Longwave

Swoons Of Gray Skies Insist They're Here

Jul 26, 2009

Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry

We're sitting here right now, the two of us, and we're really at a loss for words. It's you and me and we're just blank people - not in what's being thought because that's a beehive, a jangling storm of sparks and bullets, but in the bullets and sparks that we're going to let out of our mouths, or let our hands convey, or let the laugh and frown lines on our face pry from our emotions. It's the dance of disclosure, a convenient way of protecting whatever needs to be protected in lives - the white lies, secrets, guarded souls, wounds, joys or the mouths themselves. This is the two of us gazing out into a dark gray sky, the gray of angry smoke, where there are no contours or features to be made out, just a wall of hidden surroundings. The gray starts to speak with you and at you, but then a funny thing happens and as we're sitting in front of it, it starts speaking with us, calming our jittery veins and the thoughts that never seem to settle down. The things that I'm thinking about you and the things you're thinking about me are put out into the clouds and transferred into a different energy of loss and grief, but all of it finds a way to be constructive. We feel better before that sky, the one that faces us with no expression and a bottomless effect on our perceptions. New York's Longwave find expression in those harrowing, faceless gray skies and they send shivers through them, making them into forces that go on to help you cope with the drags and the depressions that are dealt out with abandon as if there was palpable loss and confusion ground into all of the many matters that touch us time after time. Lead singer Steve Schiltz brings us into the inner sanctum where things get garbled and the raw emotions start to beat against each other like mosquitoes on a sticky summer night in the weedy ditches or like scattered words that get thrown out like excess heat and perspiration, just needing to be rid of them for good. We're led into these cavernous rooms that are then filled up to their highest ceilings with the kinds of guitar swoons and brushfires that can overcome you and sneak up on you, causing a loss of breath or a real flushing of color. It's the sort of energy that is about if only because of these frictions that we've put into place on our own or the kinds of frictions that are bound to grow across and over us like ivy, crawling and attaching with its grabby claws, pulling us closer and closer to the point where it can affect us even more easily. The band makes those sinking feelings that seem to gravitate to daunting relationships - between friends and lovers - feel as if they're either ever present or circling the wagons or both. It makes these feelings of leaving and loving, staying and weeping - in whatever combination - seem as if they're important pieces of information to understand, as if we'd be completely remiss to just toss them off as the kinds of fleeting streams that needn't be listened to. They will be listened to though. They insist.

Longwave Official Site
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