Monday, May 19, 2008  12:05 am 

Lonely is lucky

In this room of shadows the dust dances jaunty to a tune played by timid rays of light and Lucky Dragons, a strange Friday morning turns into a reverie, a flight over prairies different tonalities of golden shifting with the sunset, descending upon the strange coralline configurations of a city blinking at us from the darkness, Lucky Dragons’ new album ‘Dream Island Laughing Language‘ sounds like High Places kit rattling in the back of a van being driven by Philip Glass and Steve Reich up into a place of magic at the summit of a blue Appalachian mountain, or Dan Deacon dreaming placid of the place ‘Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees’, and that’s all you need to now, now, listen.

Lucky Dragons- I Keep Waiting For Earthquakes

The ghost of love stops to visit us as part of its journey between the pale provinces of longing and mourning. We haven’t seen Harmony Korine’s new film Mister Lonely, but it would seem from the brief dialogue excerpts included in its soundtrack, which Jason Spaceman and Sun City Girls have sewn with beautiful threads of ambient and folk, that it is concerned with the escape from one-self which aspiration and impersonation entail, this flight is one that appears to unfold upon a strange path scribbled in a slender font so that a secret story can be tattooed in the skin of haunted landscapes (whoah).

This is a magnificent soundtrack, perhaps the best we have heard recently with that of ‘There Will be Blood’, and one that draws the contours of a film we shall be watching soon.

Sun City Girls- Mr. Lonely Viola

Mus have accompanied me for a long, long time, like a revenant shrouded in the memories of past loves, lost friendships, bereavement and melancholy, music that has always managed to bring tears, or the prelude of tears, to my eyes and which, if it was to be left behind would perhaps make for a sunnier life, but also an emptier one. As I was writing the previous songs up, I thought of them and, when researching their current whereabouts, stumbled upon an album they released last year, La Vida, and one I didn’t know about maybe because of being here in a country which looks mostly eastwards, and inwards, or because of the way my own life has gone, leaving that ghost on the side of the road, under a grey Asturian sky and bitter rain. Either way, sliding inside Mus lush architecture of despair feels like coming back to a place that I haven’t visited for a while, and one where I wouldn’t want to live in, but which nevertheless lives inside me.

Mus- La Vida

labels >> Lucky Dragons, Mus, Sun City Girls