Cloud Cult :: "Take Your Medicine"

I am frequently suspicious of statements that are prescriptive and imperative. They generally bring up my latent problems with authority and I resist them out of principle, regardless of content. Don't tell me what to do. It gets my blood up. So Cloud Cult's "Take Your Medicine" didn't have a chance when I rejected its title on ideological grounds.

But that was before I soaked the richness of the arrangement. The peeling chimes, the intimate acoustic guitar, the group vocals - it all makes "Take Your Medicine" fantastically lush. Consider the song grinds to a halt at the 1.28 mark, the chimes run down the side of everything before the layers kick back in. This happens again at the 3.30 mark before "Take Your Medicine" whirls into something else. This is liquid.

Listen :: Cloud Cult - "Take Your Medicine"

Cloud Cult :: "Pretty Voice"

It's a grey day in New York, the hint of rain and the less-than-steely resolve of humidity. It rained yesterday and the pessimists are calling for rain tomorrow until the end of the world. Of course, the glass-half-full types see some beauty in the breakdown. Whether karma or statistical odds or some platitude (it's darkest before the dawn, the light at the end of the tunnel), some of us believe that the bleakest weather (metaphorically, like a sledgehammer) is the greatest time for turn-around. Frankly, how much worse could it get?

Cloud Cult, from all the way back in 2007, offer a melancholy position on hope. Invoking superhero literature and a dramatic sense of irony (what exactly does the crowd not know?), the band chases down something painful. "Strike up the band/here comes the storyline/of the usual struggle/between fear and love." The drama is high and the melody pulses like the hum of a forgotten, yet increasingly insistent television. The narrative is about loss. But, there are messages and signals in loss (see: paragraph one). Enter hero girl. That's a quote.

Listen :: Cloud Cult - "Pretty Voice"