I really wanted to scour my Ride albums for this post, as I’m certain a great response to the Half String track lies in there somewhere. But I’m in a hotel room in Santa Barbara, CA, and my music collection is back at my house in Apex, NC, so I had to make do with what I have on hand.
So instead I offer this track by the Cribs (plus the pinch hitter of the decade, Johnny Marr), from last year’s Ignore the Ignorant. I think it combines the epic intensity of “The Story of Yo La Tengo” with the rhythmic power of “Departures.”
I obtained an mp3 of this song through less-than-perfectly-legal means a month or so before the album’s release and copied it immediately on a thumb drive that I plugged into my car. When “City of Bugs” came on, the creators of the mp3 had done a nifty trick and literally caused the track to never end—it looped at a certain point back to an earlier point in the song, and that edit seemed technically flawless. I bet I listened to the song for 22 minutes before figuring out that it wasn’t really that epic. But I think that ceaseless rising and falling is the ultimate dream of the shoegazer: music that traps the listener in a state of rapture forever.
m. joosse