The Mighty Battlecat

I'd like to take a minute to recommend an album a friend has recently recorded and released. Now, stop what you're thinking: This isn't a plug for some poorly written, badly recorded pseudo-garagerock angst-ridden adolescent-emulating effort by my closest friend. Not at all. For starters, while most of the band went to college with me, they've been recording consistently for a decade, and this is the first time I've paid attention to, let alone paid for, one of their efforts. While I have been friendly with half the members of the band since 1992 or so, we're not exactly BFF. Secondly, and much more importantly, this is a genuinely well-written, well-recorded, compelling effort. I've probably bought close to two dozen cassettes and CDs recorded by friends and friends of friends over the years, but this is undeniably the first one I've bought that stands on its own.

The band is Thunderegg and the album is A Very Fine Sample of What's Available at the Mine. You can buy it for $10 from Thunderegg.org. Or you can just visit the site and download some of the songs the band has demoed or recorded over the last few years; I particularly like "Hall Pass", the song of the week from March 14th. But the best cuts I've found are on A Very Fine Sample. Oddly, I even find myself paying attention to the lyrics - something I almost never do these days, no matter how good or bad the lyrics are. Only rarely since a friend played me "Holidays in the Sun" in the fall of 1992 while I was taking a much-needed break from a lousy first semester of college, and my whole concept of what made music great changed instantly, has a lyric stood out as strongly as this one does, from "The Mighty Battlecat":

So let's fast forward to when I'm thirty-four and I've rented a car to visit you and yours. I almost get lost on the ride across, but for once I take a right turn at the fork. I'll know you wound up with someone strong because your driveway is so long and I'll know that I won't dress like him and I'll hope that you won't rub it in. But injury would be insulted twice if you said the same thing that you said tonight, that you have warmest memories of times forgotten long and gone. Why couldn't I have been there to remind you all along?

No matter how many times I read this, it has the same effect on me, in that it perfectly captures a mood anyone who has ever loved and lost knows well: time goes on without you, and that time has already passed without you. The narrator is projecting into the future and thinking of a time when he'll be happy that the object of his affection has found her own happiness, but full of regret that it wasn't with him. The listener doesn't even know whether or not the narrator has lost the object of his affection yet, but you understand his sense of foreboding and unhappy focus. It's a perfect, bittersweet projection. It's "nostalgia for an age yet to come" (the Buzzcocks).

This is the same verse that inspired my post yesterday, but re-reading that entry today I sound like I am hopelessly lovestruck. Not so - I am happily married. (Well, I guess I am hopelessly lovestruck in that sense). But the mark of a great writer is the ability to accurately remind the reader of emotions he knows from his own experience. Thunderegg has succeeded beautifully here.