The Mean Season :: "Hearts"

In one of those lyrical turns of phrase that evokes Ben Gibbard's deconstruction of the glove compartment on "Title and Registration," Washington, D.C. band The Mean Season aim directly for the chest on lead single, "Hearts" from the band's eponymous EP. The "inaccurately named" thing here is love, or whatever the Western World approximates as love, something between Russell Stover heart-shaped candy boxes and the marriage plots that dominated literature and then reformed as women's magazines. The central couplet in "Hearts" is the destructive and deeply revisionist, "Who decided it was such a perfect symbol for love?/It's only an organ pumping your blood," as a tidy indie rock arrangement unfolds around a distant and resolute female vocal. There is no good answer to who chose our hearts as our avatars for our loves, but your gross, bloody, perfect little fist hammers in your chest, four chambers, each as necessary as the one beside it. You know, something to keep your fingers warm.

Listen :: The Mean Season - "Hearts"