Light For Fire :: "NY (By The Hand)"

For those of us that moved to New York after college, it became a common refrain to joke about how the city could run you over if you weren't careful. It was beautiful, to be sure, but it had a sandpaper side, or maybe a strange sense of humor, that could leave you living in a rat-trap loft in Bushwick and riding the bus to your low paying job. To cite a smarter mind: You may ask yourself, how did I get here? In the context of Light For Fire's recounting of a summer in Brooklyn, and what sounds like a fantastic destruction at the hands of a girl named "Christine", our gallows humor about New York, told through the lens of later successes, seems downright tame. With sonic references to the taut, straight-faced pop of Spoon, singer, Nicholas Allard, formerly of The Village Green, wrote the body of the lyrics on the plane back to Portland, Oregon, after, we imagine, Christine hit him at highway speed and kept going. The city can do that, especially in the wilds of East Williamsburg, where Allard later confesses, "Bushwick has me by the hand." This is either a compliment or a prelude to a disaster, or both, in a city of sub-orbital highs and industrial wasteland kicks in the teeth.

Listen :: Light For Fire - "NY (By The Hand)"