the Reviews
Air & Tortoise: a Randomized Perspective

Y'know, it occured to me at some point that the discography section of this site might mean nothing to some of you since you're downloading your tracks piecemeal from Napster or some such place, so straighten up in that chair and pay attention as Amity breaks it down for you with random reviews of a random assortment of downloaded tracks.

inspired by yr recommendations on the site, i am sitting here now listening to air french band and tortoise and i kinda feel like ramblin about why i think it is appealing and what i think it sounds like. i hadn't heard of air french band until the cd you made this summer and since i saw virgin suicides, and i dig them a lot. tortoise i hadn't heard of until this morning, at which point i went and napped a coupla songs by them - benway, monica, tin cans and twine. so i am basing all my ramblingsandmusings at this point on those songs...

so here goes - random and spontaneous opinions in real time...

kelly watch the stars (a.f.b. - air french band, not air force base), which is on now, reminds me of a song that would play at babylon's, this club i used to go to in greensboro. i only went on sundays when it was retro gay night. you have never seen so many gay men cheering for "i will survive." i think that crowd would approve of this song.

talisman (afb) - is on now, and i really like this song - maybe better than the other ones i have heard by afb. all the music, of both afb and tortoise (that i have heard)- besides sounding like a party in the apt next door, which, i agree it does, has that really uncomfortable feeling of a crime scene renactment on "america's most wanted" right before the actual crime scene occurs. it's the music that tells you that the lady should NOT answer the door, and that despite the major chord melody, the beat syncopation tells you that this is not your average day at the beach. It's like a day at the beach seenthrough one of those fuzzy filters where the kids are playing in slow motion and their voices come at you through echo chambers, and you know, despite their laughter now, one will soon be eaten by a shark, or something equally horrible. it's like being the only one that sees the shark fin swimming in the water and being able to do nothing for the kid that thinks it's a dolphin.

(man, i dig this "talisman" track, playing AGAIN)

to continue with your party metaphor, the songs by afb that are in french (unfortunately not a language i speak AT ALL) make me feel that maybe i got invited to the party next door, but i was already drunk when i got there, knew no one, and blamed my drunkenness for my inability to understand the small talk the hot boy in the corner was trying to make with me, when in fact he, and everyone else at the party is speaking a language i don't understand but am expected to. it's that moment right before you pass out and your head is swimmy.

tortoise also has that (from the 3 songs i now know) very uncomfortable, uneasy feeling to it. like the feeling i remember getting from the "twin peaks" soundtrack in early high school. it's like there's something just a little off about all the tracks, and you just can't put your finger on what it is. "benway" made me think my doorbell was ringing, but made me afraid to go to answer it. it's like seeing the oddities of the human condition and realizing that being a human is a VERY weird thing (like how it is that elderly people sit in rest homes eating ham from a can and watching reruns of "let's make a deal" where people in chicken suits are literally jumping up and down over the prospect of winning a toaster oven). now THAT makes me
uncomfortable.

why do we like it so much? for me, at least partially it's because that object just out of grasp is always the most infinitely appealing one. that elusive melody that changes keys just as i start humming is always the one i like the best. it's the same reason why, that guy i saw in the dog run in the park this weekend was SO damn hot - he'll never ask to buy me a drink and i will never ask to bum a smoke from him. he just does his thing and i stand on the outside of the fence trying to look cool. he makes me feel like an outsider who really wants to taste life on the inside but knows that if i did, it would lose a lot of its appeal.

the tragedy element has to be part of it too - all of this music is like dangling on the edge of a precipice, walking to the edge of a ledge and ignoring the fact that it's a damn long fall. the music draws us in like the tragic hero does. it suggests that moment, right before the phone lines are cut and the lights go out. it makes you the sole observer of the achilles heel of the hero, where you both pity him and desire him because of his flaws. for those of us without the balls to live on the edge (or the intelligence not to), this music, with its distortions and slightly muted and hard to understand vocals, lets us observe the tragedy at a safe distance.

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