Search - Nineteen Forty Five :: I Saw a Bright Light

Without Any Sense or a Flattery

06/25/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This has been my second favorite album of the last two years (hot on the heels of _Yankee Hotel Foxtrot_). It's not earth-shattering musically-a tight power trio with feedback-heavy guitar and way-listenable boy-girl vocal interplay; it's just addictive, is all. During the month that I listened essentially to nothing else, each of the twelve songs except for number 3, "Glass Diamond," flooded my fibers in turn for two days at a time. And "Glass Diamond" is one of the songs _CMJ_ raves about (see their online April reviews archive). The other raver is the album's obvious center of gravity: "Someday I'll End It All." This song consists only of guitar, gorgeous vocal harmony, and plaintive ebow, framing an astonishingly moving poem that seems to be as much about my dead sister as it is about suicide. It is the sort of song that marks the band's maturation. I really liked Nineteen Forty-Five's first album, _Together We Will Burn Like Autumn Leaves_, but what sets this one apart, along with a measurable growth in confidence and competence, are the ballads. Two of the slower songs, "Living on the Waves" and "I'm Still Singing," will be top-forty hits in heaven. Check also the hidden track: ebow again, female voice harmonizing beautifully with itself, absolutely worth the serious rectal pain it takes to find the freakin thing (scan to the 7:19 mark of track eleven). It begins, "The dead speak/so promise me then you'll remember to." God. The ballads really just emphasize how much this record rocks, with pogo-prompters like "She Takes Drugs," "Sylvia Plath," "The Police Let Her Get Away" (another one with "single" written all over it), and "Aurora Borealis." But the true treasure of this album is the lyrics. Find and print those from the band's website. College papers will be written on them someday (maybe after lyricist Hunter Manasco has ended it all). The album puts a fresh spin on the old "love equals death equals love" equation, summed up in the opening verse of the ecstatic "Make Out in the Dark": "I fall/ every time she calls/ into an early grave/ that's growing in the room/with lips/ like ribbons on a gift/ man I finally got laid/ by someone who is just like me." Suicide references, many of them much more explicit than this one, pervade the album, but they are balanced by an equal number of original expressions of crushing, comforting love and desire. I'll forebear an exposition on the many ways the album breathes new life into that eternal truth, since I'm already way over Amazon's suggested word limit. And I don't want to rob anyone the pleasure of finding them themselves."