In that emotional space between a good drunk and sobriety, I’m sitting here on this Sunday morning listening to Hum’s monument to perfection, 1997’s Downward is Heavenward , at the infinite and revealing mercy of every moment in that beautiful album that swept off the Illinois prairie and into my permanent regard. I am particularly vulnerable to the band’s sound for reasons of my nativity, perhaps, with the spacey thunder of those guitars that imply infinity so akin to the endless flat expanses of Illinois fields over which the unbearable heat and humidity of summer shiver.
Last night at Studio B, Tigersushi’s Poni Hoax put on a little party for us. They sounded great, played with an austere setup of two keyboards, a guitar, and a backline, and their singer is balding and wore bad sunglasses…. Leaping around to his own band’s fantastic soundtrack, I remember thinking that I liked that my first reaction to seeing this guy performing was enmity, because despite any visually induced prejudices I may have wanted to bring to the table, there I was on the floor fully dancing with my friends in rapt enjoyment of music that a band was unabashedly good at making.
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