THE LEGACY OF BILL GRAHAM
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Radiation City

Sample this concert
  1. 1Welcome to Daytrotter00:08
  2. 2Summer Is Not An Act 104:34
  3. 3The Things You Tell Us04:52
  4. 4Park04:44
  5. 5Babies05:51
  6. 6Construction04:30
Radiation City Oct 7, 2011
Liner Notes

It feels like we could just separate, listening to Radiation City's song, "The Things You Tell Us," a spookily gusty piece that makes you grab tightly to the collar of the coat you're wearing and pull it in tighter around your neck. It seems like you might be losing more heat than you can afford to, through that gap between coat edge and chest. The colder air rushes in like a fast train when any motions are made with the hands or whenever any bending or bowing is done. It's a little about preservation, or hoarding of that body heat. There's no reason to share it. It's fine to be greedy with it because you're going to need it. Lizzy Ellison, singing on "The Things You Tell Us," gives us a belly-full of magnificent dynamic tension, as if we were being stirred up, but we weren't sure by what or by whom. It's like we're standing out in the middle of nowhere, without another sound cluttering our thoughts. We stand there to hear the whistling of the wind in our ears, to hear the timidity of all that's going on within us. It's like everything's stretching to its very tippy parts to get closer to the origin of the whistle, the origin of the pushing of the air. The origin seems to remain out there, somewhere in the hanging balance, in a spot that's nearly impossible to reach no matter what efforts are taken. We feel like begging beasts, as if we're barking for the things that we'll never get at -- that white illumination that will continue to remain fleeting and ambivalent, or slippery. We feel like the skin could fly off, like there are lead pellets resting in the pit of our stomach, like the decorative pebbles on the bottoms of aquariums and the next thing we know, a strong enough magnet is going to spring our guts right out from our midsection and it too will fly off. Our hair's being whipped around and our ribs are flying off their hinges, zipping away like marrowed boomerangs, clipping the low-hanging leaves as they leave. It feels like there's an unsettling in the music of this song, as if there are things percolating below the surface, things that we're just not being told, things that will come to light soon. Everything's tame enough, but there's no way that it will last. We're sure of it. We feel as if there's a spell brewing and we're interested to see how it affects us all.