“To tell the truth” – I’m not sick of it all

“They tell you to tell the truth
That’s a lie in itself”
Sick Of It All

Last Saturday I went to a show with Converge and Sick Of It All. It was sponsored by some Skateshop. They had stacked up 50 cubic meters of snow for snowboarding during the day. While the starving children in Africa were sweating and the polar ice caps shrinked another meter in a second from the shock etc. blah blah.
When I went to the tram I took another way as usual. I went through a small path that leads along the backyards of a couple of shops and a pub. I had used that path a lot in the summers when I was 15 – 18 years old because in front of that pub there always sat some men who whistled at and commented dirtily on every female being that went down the street. (That was what Fugazi’s “why can’t I walk down a street free of suggestion” always captured for me.) Those guys always had the sunshades so far down that you couldn’t see their eyes and I guess they didn’t see your face but just your body. I guess that made them feel free to talk as if you weren’t there. I remember how one day I stopped and shouted at them to shut the fuck up and stop it. Of course I was ridiculed and told they had they right to look at whatever they wanted to and to say whatever they wanted to but it still felt strangely empowering that I had at least said something.
Well, I don’t know why but last Saturday I took that path for the first time after many years and right now… well, I just realise that this has been a far too long introduction for the little incident that took place: 6 or 7 bats attacked me. No, actually they didn’t attack me at all, it just seemed no one else ever walks there at night and they felt disturbed and flew wild and angry circles around me. It made me smile cause they came so close and I knew they wouldn’t hit me.
Anyway. This little incident for sure was more exciting than the Converge show. I only saw the four last songs and they played rather energetically or at least I think so but I can’t really ‘feel’ music like theirs in such big venues. I didn’t meet the old friend that had helped me to get in for free which I had really looked forward to but I met another friend with whom I got lost in a conversation and we ended up talking about totally bourgeois stuff like cosmetic products that smell like fruit and about growing vegetables in gardens instead of watching Sick Of It All. When we got no more beer at the bar we left and I walked home which took me almost an hour and made me feel all quiet inside.
Sunday was filled to the brim with doing laundry and writing press infos. Both usually are not my favorite kinds of work but if you can sit in the garden and sip on a brandnew cocktail (campari / pineapple juice / strawberry limes) it’s kind of okay.

The new Liars album is really really good. It’s like they threw part of their abstractness overboard, not enough to lose their weirdness credibility but enough to carefully weigh the word ‘pop’ in your hands while talking about them. And enough to remind of the Augustus-Pablo-reverbness Clinic brought into rock. And of the noisy haunted way of implying melodies that TV On The Radio have in common with Sonic Youth.

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