The Eastern Sea :: "The Match"

Most creative people have either a healthy fascination with or an abject fear of fire. This is certainly reductionist but we only have a paragraph and The Eastern Sea have less than five minutes on spacious and elevating single, "The Match." Opening with loose guitars and the kind of image-heavy lyrics like, "watching stray cats under cars" and "lighting matches just for fun, running fire along your thumb," the band paints a dark and pastoral summer front porch from which to build the rest of the arrangement. "The Match" unfolds twice - and we won't necessarily presume some kind of form-meets-function thing from illumination to extinguishing - the first around the introduction of drums, a satisfying shift at the 1.53 mark, and then the movement toward the conclusion, an ascent that includes horns and a veritable church of backing vocals. The conclusion is as austere as the opening, guitars replaced by insistent drums, and the crushing final lyric, "Is it you or is it me?" How better to put the fine line between the power of light and the heat of destruction?