My friend Sheldon usually points me to new music. He works at Pac Sun and has to listen to all the West Coast top 40 and underground music. This time I found one before him. Armor For Sleep's album What to Do When Your Dead is a great story. It's one of these rare disc's that you have to listen in order to really get the full experience. I've posted the lyrics to one of the tracks on my poetry blog.
The music is akin to Fallout Boy and New Found Glory. Up and quick with a nice beat. I played it for a few days before I actually listened to the words and it really started to work on my morbid depression mongering. The music itself isn't emo at all.
It starts off with Car Underwater, where someone dies in a car underwater. A suicide note and news story about being abandoned. The song goes up and down about how it's so terrible that "I would still die for you".
The next track is about coming back to earth to tell her how it's always raining in heaven and the weather isn't better the day you die.
It continues with a realization that it was all a lie and how it was all a waste. I won't fall for it next time. Great music, fast and upbeat through the whole track.
That of course is fallowed by Awkward Last Words. "I wanna live again." Very happy and upbeat, hope again.
Then the ghost starts to realize there's no going back, and gets sick of trying and gives up.
A little ditty about how no one sees me at all. I picture this as a walk in a crowd.
Obsession takes over again, the boredom and dislocation starts to erode sanity. He starts to live life through her interactions with others, who never respond to what he says, only what she does.
Then a song about haunting her house. This track really kills me. It's the first one that drops the tempo down from something really upbeat and happy. He's singing to her, and he thinks he hears her asking him to keep singing. The sense of time passing also leaves him, he talks about living here for ever, and never remembering anything else.
He takes a trip to where they met and begs her not to leave him alone.
Then he realizes that he really is dead, and his heart isn't beating. He starts to break free, the dream of death is letting him go.
Then he leaves again, for the second time. His final words are "don't believe that the weather is perfect the day that you die" This track has that guttural "I hate my dad" god smack wanna be screamer crap that I hate, so it's the one track I really could live without.
All in all tho, the whole album is awesome. The music is great, and the lyrics are a sneaker emotional roller coaster if you let them in and try to visualize what's going on with the singer.
For sure a 5 of 5
