It's been a somewhat spare year for new music that has really blown me away. I'm not sure if it's because my favorite artists are taking the year off or we're in the middle of a drought that I'd rather not entertain but I've kept a weekly list of my favorite song since I first bought an iPod back in 2004 (Modest Mouse's "Float On" was the first #1) and the the top song this September and for several weeks in a row has been Desaparecidos "MariKKKopa", which is a remarkably good song about the racist immigration policies of Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona and also marks the wondrous return of Conor Oberst's most raging musical project and perhaps the best he's sounded in years but alas, it's not a song that necessarily blew me away nor one that really deserves a bunch of uninterrupted weeks at the top of my musical chart. A song needs to be "special" to achieve that, usually, but things have been so slow on the music scene this year, nothing has been better. Don't get me wrong, there's a bunch of good songs out there, a bunch of good albums, but something truly special? It's been a while. Maybe not since the year started when Shearwater's "You as You Were" lit up my mind and became the frontrunner for Vague Space song of the year. But then, last week, I heard "Waking Season", the first song off veteran post rock band Caspian's latest album of the same name and all of a sudden we not only have the #1 song of the week but a potential song of the year. I was blown away on the very first listen and haven't been disappointed in subsequent listens since. The song starts particularly slow, an almost ethereal sound that begins with subdued piano and cymbals that sound like the wind but it builds through guitars and subtle rhythms until the build becomes the song around the 2 minute mark and then -- wait for it... no, really, wait for it... the final minute when the drums explode! it's the best minute of music of the year so far. By far. The song reminds me a bit of Sigur Ros's "Samskeyti", maybe my favorite Sigur Ros song, a song that repeats the same rhythmic sound throughout but it builds, everything builds, always pushing, almost reaching, for the moment that the song just rips through your ears and down to your heart and if you don't feel like cranking the volume in the final moment of this track, you really can't feel anything at all......... The rest of the album is also quite good, particularly the next two tracks, but I really haven't been able to digest their wonder when I'm so obsessed with "Waking Season". And my love for music is awake again.
Buy Waking Season
Listen below. And fall in love.
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