GIRLS AGAINST BOYS

You can’t fight what you can’t see

LP/CD, Jade Tree

They are back. Definitely that is a good thing. Not that they have ever been away per se, but the last couple of records by Girls against boys never caught my attention due to the sublevel of artistic estrangement and incongruity. That is to say, they did stuff and moved in directions I didn’t give a damn about. Even the New Wet Kojak didn’t interest me so much. Yeah, maybe I have been fighting my own ghosts one way or another and that we drifted apart the same lengths, which doubled the space between us, but fact is, we come together again. Basstastic, I say. Song number two on “you can’t fight what you can’t see – all the rage” comes as a righteous déjà vu to me. Listen up: “hey pussycat, what’s new? What’s live? What’s dead? What’s making it wrong time wrong place? Locked in, locked out.” Describes the situation pretty well, but I glad we cleared it all up. But the question remains: what makes a record perfect for a certain situation? What makes a situation perfect? How do lives interact and thought find parallel way? Or the opposite? Is it all just a matter of accident and big numbers that make up the average?

Maybe it is all just about finding that one bass-riff, the drum-rhythm to fit and then some words to make the whole thing fly. You won’t be able to withhold the headpopping and swinging, because that groove is deadly. Imagine that coming through the fattest PA your city can offer, and then fly. Miami Skyline, Hollywood Hills, New York versus LA, it is all there for you to visit, embellish and devour. You know, it is a new world, and it has been made especially for you, to live in, and to enjoy. They even manage a slow song for you, a ballad (well it’s not a “ballad”) and it really fits, with all its glorious melody and understated guitar-noise in the background. If you are looking for amazement this summer, just go ahead, it is right there for you to take.

One more thing: you can’t fight what you hear or smell, either. A sound is there, you can never stop it. A smell is there, you can’t stop it. You can only fight the source of the smell or the noise, so indirectly you’ll get rid of the sound and the smell as well. The same goes for what you can’t smell or hear. Usually, most of the times, the things you have to fight the most, are the things you can’t hear, smell or see or touch, that are completely absent to your perceptive possibilities. That is, the thing you have to fight the most are ideas and structures. As with musical mainstream formulas, also ideologies and societal misconstructions effect and finally result into perceptible situations: poverty, racism, gangwars, TV soap operas, commerciality, shopping mall Santa Claus, and so on. The important thing is to remember is, the reason for the existence of these things is usually not the first thing that comes to your mind, because there is a whole chain of reasons and structures behind that. E.g. a backwards encrypted line of a possible argumentation of gangwars: gangwars > drugs > money > poverty > class-war > capitalism > money > ownership > history and so on and on and on and on. Even our society and history are one big syncopated riff of unbelievable dimensions.