is that so wrong?

The Luyas - Too Beautiful To Work

This song starts all frantic and confused, clamouring for your attention at the piano, hammering out a song that makes almost no sense. It shouldn't work but it does. The rhythms are all unfinished, the vocals murmured and breathless, the lyrics jarring and disconnected. Ideas collide in mid-air and land on the drumbeat to be carried along like scrap metal on a conveyer belt, hurried away by the only part of this mess that makes sense - and somehow at the end, welded together ingeniously into the finest few minutes of out and out confusion this side of Kerouac, stumbling and tumbling, and over far too soon. Whatever the Luyas are trying to tell us, they really mean it. And I love the way they say it.

This is the title song from their second album, and I love it like an absolute maniac. You can buy it here. Then, after you've listened to it repeatedly, you can go here for a nice bootleg, here for some nice pictures, and here for some great live footage. They're also on tour. You should go, they're pretty damn charming in person.

into the earth

This song is at least slightly about the Irish countryside and the way it might look at you, and that's the bit that speaks to me most. It howls into life like a wolf from the woods, and given that it's about ten years since I lived in the quiet country dark, it gives me the weirdest feeling of being back in a childhood place, cold and abandoned, layered with the years of silence and absence. It's weird how you can go back to places like this, and often they seem smaller and less significant, but sometimes they seem to have turned their back on you. These things happen.

I haven't written nearly as much about The Ambience Affair as I should have, but they have these songs, that they hold tightly in their hands, and they are worth every minute you give them.