art of fighting - "along the run" (from the second storey lp, available for purchase as an import here.)

"is this emo?" a former co-worker asked me, he being a partisan of the genre if not its name. well, i don't know. certainly the name could fool one into such thinking, but their australian citizenship would seem to discount them.

this was the other song i had intended on posting the other day. i was going to segue into discussing it by saying something like, "now this is the kind of song one has come to expect from bobby wratten, at least as trembling blue stars." i suppose the difference is that art of fighting singer ollie browne seems, relatively speaking, to be taking his loss all too well.

yes, relistening i can understand how someone would hear emo in this--indeed, i can hear dashboard confessional covering it all too easily. what separates "along the run," though, is setting. it's not a song delivered from a stage or on a stool at a bar; rather, one approaches the song through a dim haze, then up the stairs (yes, to the second storey) into an attic. one is either looking at an old photo or out a dusty window onto the distant city. "along the run" calls for the adjective "windswept," and rare is the song that can do this w/o the presence of a string section. the band conjure that wind and control its direction and strength until, at song's close, satisfied to embrace it, surrendering that control.

"along the run" would be, for many other bands, a trump card--to return to the stage metaphor, it'd bring down the curtain. what's most remarkable, then, about art of fighting, and something that tells you a bit about the band and the album, is that they use it to open their album. a tone is set and not easily abandoned.