My computer, apparantly, has a bad hard drive. I forgot that as I wrote this entry. As is my usual habit, I wrote it in the diary-x page for updating. It crashed. Normally you can still select the text and copy and paste it away before letting it crash, but not here. No.
I feel rage. Too much of it. I'm already running late, I might not get the dishes done, and I don't want to go to work (no reason in particular, just the regular not wanting to work). I am so glad I chose this song.
'Days Of Being Wild' slams out of the gate, the band howling about being alive in jail/Alive and well, and does not let up for a minute and a half. As with much of And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead's wondrous Source Tags & Codes album, it is rage in sonic form. The original review I had written noted that And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead (who, unfortunately, resist acronyms, ellipses and excerptions) were not punk, a fact I was compelled to point out because of the surface similarity between a song like 'Days Of Being Wild' and punk. But where punk is ultimately about rebellion, rock is about agression*. And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead have a better handle on this than most modern rock bands, even to the extent of knowing that unrelenting agression is less effective than varying your attack.
So a minute and a half into 'Days Of Being Wild' the drums cease their martial stomp, the guitars start glinding rather than crashing, and there is a short, quiet, bridge. There are whispered vocals. And then everything powers back up again for
Go
Down
Down to find some peace
Driven to shambles on a tip
I never said that I would quit
And the next song takes over
It doesn't sound like much on the page,but anyone who has heard the song nows why it is powerful. The whole thing is repeated again and again, I never said that I would quit especially reverberating like a curse or a promise, as one of the other members of the band begins a spoken word dialogue. There's no transcription in the booklet, and he's not quite decipherable, but he sound contemptuous.
What 'Days Of Being Wild' is about is, to me, a mystery; I know I catch the words 'amphetamines', 'jail', the phrase around my throat you came so close to stopping me. But it sounds exactly the way I feel when I'm pissed off. As I am now.
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*I may be stealing this distinction from Glenn McDonald; who makes a similar series of distinctions somewhere.
