12.11.2006

MUSIC - The Scourge of the Sea, "Make Me Armored"

The Scourge of the Sea is either playing against archetype on their new album, Make Me Armored, or exactly to it. Lo-fi alternative meets upbeat folk music, yoked tenuously to cynical love songs. There’s no politics here, just a lovelorn melancholy, but the folk roots (far from Simon & Garfunkel, regardless of the lyrics,( “Goodbye darkness, my old friend”) are what sell this act. Jaded, but not jagged, the album is surprisingly sweet, even though the poetics are often cliché (“your summer eyes were full of grace”), cryptic (“but I tied my love to the paper bag and I tied a jackal to my leg”), saccharine (“my sweet one hurts when she goes down my throat/my sweet one is a thirty-two ounce coke”), or all three at once. But hey, if the songs stay light even when the material gets dark, then so can I.

Read on at [
Silent Uproar]

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