I’m 45, these days.\u00a0 Big thrills come fewer and farther between than they used to.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Which in many ways is a good thing.\u00a0 When you’re a teenager or an overdramatic twentysomething, hormones and that lack of jading that most of us start out life with make way <\/em>too much stuff seem like life and death.\u00a0 The dumbest<\/em> stuff matters like life and death when you’re a kid – and having two teenagers in the house, I do see that all the dang time.<\/p>\n One of the things that’s have some of its searing immediacy shaved off over the years is rock and roll.\u00a0<\/p>\n I used to wear my heart on my sleeve when it came to music; thrills and chills in the form of a\u00a0thousand little moments were all over the place.\u00a0\u00a0They came in places you’d expect – Darkness on the Edge of Town<\/a><\/em> and London Calling<\/a><\/em> and Who’s Next<\/a><\/em> and The Pretenders<\/a><\/em> and The Crossing<\/a><\/em> and Tim<\/a> <\/em>and The Unforgettable Fire<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and Have A Good Time (But Get Out Alive)<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>sure – all of them are albums that are packed full of big moments that seemed to sum up big chunks of my life.\u00a0<\/p>\n And beyond that, there are a zillion other little moments – not even necessarily on songs I like, <\/em>even, but moments where I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard them, and describe the jolt it gave me.\u00a0 “We Live For Love” by Pat Benatar takes me back to the first night at my first radio job; “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey, hanging around the dorm my freshman year of college; “Forever” by Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul is always tied to sitting at the dam and looking up at the stars in the summer of ’82; “GirlUWant” by Devo is inseparable from high school speech team trips to Fargo and Grand Forks; “Nights In White Satin” by the Moody Blues is all about sitting in a car at 2AM, lovelorn and anxious to get the hell out of North Dakota…<\/p>\n …and I could go on.\u00a0 Indeed, over the past six years on this blog, I have<\/em> gone on.\u00a0 But most of those are interesting to me as historical artifacts – sort of an audio museum of my life.\u00a0<\/p>\n These moments – little snippets of musical genius or just emotional accidents in the right place at the right time – happen less and less often these days.\u00a0 And when they do <\/em>happen, lately, it seems like they’re mostly songs from way back<\/a> when that make me wonder “how did<\/em> I miss this one, or forget it, all these years?”<\/p>\n I can count the number of artists that’ve made me sit up and go “Yeaaaaah!” and feel that jitter up my spine that comes from having a big epiphany, that’d make me think “I’ll remember where I was when I heard this the first time”, on probably a couple of fingers.<\/p>\n Eminem’s Eight Mile <\/em>soundtrack had a bunch of ’em.<\/p>\n Franky Perez<\/a>?\u00a0 Poor Man’s Son<\/em> had a bunch – enough to make me think he was a Cuban-American Springsteen when I first caught him, five years ago.\u00a0 That he is not a superstar is an indictment of the American music industry.<\/p>\n But most of all, there’s Marah<\/a>.<\/p>\n Marah is a band from Philadephia, Brooklyn, or points somewhere in between depending on who you google.\u00a0 And calling them a “band” is a little misleading – it’s really the Bielanko brothers, Dave and Serge, along with (for the past couple of years) keyboardist Christine Smith.\u00a0 They’ve been around for a long time – their discography goes back to 1997 – but their national breakout of sorts came in 2000, with Kids In Philly<\/a><\/em>, an album recorded above an auto-repair shop in Philadelphia that evoked Springsteen’s The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle<\/em> in enough ways to set an amateur music critic off on a Hornbyesque orgy of taxonomizing.\u00a0 The lyrics were as rapid-fire and dense as anything Springsteen wrote pre-Jon Landau; the music was as gleefully, eclectically alt-country as Springsteen’s sophomore effort swerved between rock and R’nB.\u00a0 And Kids in Philly<\/em> was about <\/em>Philadelphia – or at least the neighborhood the album came from, with its Italian diners and Vietnamese barbers and South Asian groceries – as E Street Shuffle<\/em> was about the Jersey Shore via Bleecker Street.<\/p>\n The similarities didn’t escape the critics or, more importantly, me.\u00a0\u00a0“Faraway You” is a banjo-driven (?) raveup\u00a0that’s equal parts zydeco\u00a0and\u00a0rockabilly, with a little Irish snuck in there (you have to\u00a0work for it).\u00a0\u00a0“Point Breeze” evokes E Street Shuffle<\/em>‘s title cut, while “Christian Street” takes the same spirit and sticks a rocket-booster horn section behind it and wraps it with a production style that tries to mimic the Spektor “Wall of Sound” on a tiny budget, with glorious results; they bring in legendary Philadelphia disk jockey Hy Lit<\/a> to kick things off, tying together five decades<\/a> into three minutes.\u00a0 “The Catfisherman” is a slinky bit of funk blues with a nasty surprise.\u00a0 And for all the joyous stomping and pre-Sorpranos underworld tourism, some of the lower-key moments stick out just as much; “My Heart Is The Bums On The Street” may be the best closing-time lament since the Replacements’ “Here Comes A Regular”.\u00a0<\/p>\n And if that’d been their only contribution to music history, I’d be sitting here, eight years later, raving about them still.\u00a0 It was the kind of album a great garage band should do; yes, done in\/above a garage, but brimming with a glee at being able to play rock and roll<\/em> that crackled through the headphones and made you think, damn, it isn’t <\/em>a sin to be glad you’re alive.<\/p>\n For a while, it seemed that’s what I’d do, eventually – write about a great old album.\u00a0\u00a0I followed the band via their website for most of the last eight years; along about 2004, it seemed they were going to be consigned to the “acoustic duo show” ghetto, playing coffee shops and little clubs to the hard-core fans.\u00a0<\/p>\n And yet not only have they soldiered on, they’ve gotten better.\u00a0 2005 brought If You Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry<\/em>, an even better album full of even better moments than Philly<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n And earlier this year came Angels of Destruction<\/em>, maybe their best yet.\u00a0 And, like any “best yet” from an unknown, almost-there band, it couldn’t happen without a problem; on the even of a tour in support of the album, their rhythm section quit<\/a>; Marah, indeed, seems to go through backlines like Spinal Tap went through drummers.\u00a0 The Bielankos and Smith forged on, and are on the road again, sort of<\/a>. (Hint, guys – the Twin Cities.\u00a0 C’mon).\u00a0<\/p>\n And yet the album absolutely shimmers; there are too many high points to name – the title cut, “Coughing Up Blood”, “Santos De Madera” and enough others that I’m going to start sounding like a shill before long.\u00a0<\/p>\n Which’d be a shame – because the point is, as I’ve gotten to be older, I’ve gotten to be a lot harder to impress.\u00a0 Hell – it’s gotten a lot harder for me to notice<\/em> music and remember it.\u00a0 And yet Marah – bittersweet, joyful and rollicking and smoky and sweaty and eccentric and maddeningly-just-shy-of-famous and occasionally pit-of-the-soul poignant – never misses.\u00a0<\/p>\n And hey – nice to know there’s other fans out there<\/a>\u00a0– that’s a blog that posts lots of videos, including a few full performances, including this one at Weert, Holland<\/a>.\u00a0 Worth a look.<\/p>\n Anyway – your mission is clear.\u00a0 If you only buy one album this year, buy Kids in Philly <\/em>and If You Didn’t Laugh…<\/em> and Angels<\/em>, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m 45, these days.\u00a0 Big thrills come fewer and farther between than they used to.\u00a0 Which in many ways is a good thing.\u00a0 When you’re a teenager or an overdramatic twentysomething, hormones and that lack of jading that most of us start out life with make way too much stuff seem like life and death.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}