young hearts spark fire

what are sundays good for? other than sleeping in, lazing around the house and nursing self-inflicted wounds from the night before, it’s hard to say. my sundays never get started before they wilt again into a type of eerie stillness that doesn't seem to exist on other nights. i guess the world is just hiding and waiting for another week to jump out from behind a bush and pummel them.

it was 9:47 p.m. before i realized other people may actually show up to see real estate and japandroids at local 506 this past sunday night. folks cautiously trickled in out of the foreign cold and stood wingspans apart in the uneasy dark. no one really said anything. i sat by the wall, swirling my beer, obsessively checking my phone for new text messages. when real estate finally took the stage, the slight crowd that had gathered inched forward but stopped about 10 feet from the band. everyone is wary on sundays.

from the first note, real estate were (and this is not gushing) everything i'd hoped they'd be. i'd been collecting their splashy tunes dispersed across the internet since the beginning of the year, but i really didn't have any frame of reference on them, except that they were from new jersey and were seemingly fixated on the seaside. the good thing about seeing bands who haven't been around the block for years and years is that when you see them live, you are pretty certain to hear the vast majority of their canon. real estate, graciously, played among others, 'green river,' 'suburban beverage,' 'fake blues,' and 'beach comber' (which may or may not be my favorite song of this year). every song resolved itself like i remembered, but they all (unsurprisingly) felt heavier and more expansive live.

though much has been made of real estate and their ‘beach aesthetic,’ the more i thought about it that night, the more i realized they reminded me of something more complicated-- i didn’t see myself sitting out by the water, skin burning from the sun, feet burning from the sand. the music feels more like the act of looking at faded pictures of yourself at the beach when you were younger—questionable swimwear fashion, sandbuckets, ambivalent smiles drawn out from summer living. these kinds of pictures may be more perfect than reality, but they feel depressing because they are either not entirely true or too distant to be verified. with all this in mind, i realized real estate seem to be a better winter band than summer one—they make the music of grasping toward lost warmth. it is the fleeting feeling of heat and glistening sunlight on water somewhere back in your head and not in front of your eyes that i get from their shimmery guitars and wistful vocals. it is a louder dreamlike version of false memories of sand and surf conveyed through a sound that's distinct and hauntingly familiar. perhaps i need to visit atlantic city.

on that cold night, likely the coolest we’ve had in central north carolina in the second half of 2009, another band (that somehow also reminds me of warmth) took the stage and rocked out to exact extent necessary for a late sunday evening. japandroids are from vancouver and mostly play loud, energetic songs about girls and love and stuff like that. this band’s songs remind me of spring rather than summer, how you get that nervous bouncy glow inside about the sun and the flowers coming back after a long, cold winter. japandroids (there are but two of them) pack the stage with various shapes and sizes of amps, a drum kit, and a fan (which is a good idea since the guitarist, brian, thrashes about a lot while he plays). the songs are built on propulsion, reverb, and some nice drum work, but they all have just enough melody to keep you interested and wanting to sing (shout) along. unfortunately, the set was a little short, likely on account of the fact that brian started losing his voice midway through. nevertheless, they played all the hits-- 'heart sweats,' 'the boys are leaving town,' 'young hearts spark fire,' etc. towards the end, a few people actually began to nod their heads a little. then it was over. i threw my empty high life into the bin and made my way back to a deader than dead franklin street.

there is probably no help for sundays. monday will always be there staring over your shoulder, gnashing its teeth. the world will still be huddled inside watching football or counting down the hours until work starts again. i guess in spite of that, it’s good to venture out and try to put your mind somewhere else (idealized forms of the beach, memories of springtime butterflies, etc.), if only for a little while.

real estate: www.myspace.com/letsrockthebeach (their self-titled LP is set to come out november 17, so you should definitely try to pick it up)

japandroids: http://www.myspace.com/japandroids (their first LP ‘post-nothing’ came out a couple months ago, so get it)