Map
Teaching Turtles to Fly
Reviewed by Treble Bandoppler
Confusion and understandable ego-centric trances always seem to follow the trained, studied melody, and the experimentation therewith, or at least they seem to whenever an electric guitar is involved. You know, lines like, "I'm not here / I'm not there / And all I've ever done / Is all I've never done / I'm no one / I'm someone," etc. - this particular round of mental spinning coming from Map's "The Smile Summer Forgot," but it could have come from a few hundred other songs. There is absolutely nothing new about whispering contradictions and flippancy and exaggerated nihilism, but at the same time there is nothing all that cliche or worn out about it. I mean, you can lick a Tootsie Pop a thousand times, or something like that, and you are going to get to a faux-chocolate center every time; and even quicker if you just break down and bite. You know that going in, and you are either looking forward to it or dreading it (if, say, you like the Pop part and not the Tootsie part), but you lick or suck just the same. You know? Take the song "How to Disappear Completely" from Radiohead's Kid A - "I'm not here / This isn't happening," ad infinitum. It's the same stew of self-pity and common denominator introspective slash intellectual gibberish, but to say one stream of narcissistic consciousness pre-dated another, or that one is more profound than another, or anything of the sort, is downright preposterous. These are universal questions, defense mechanisms, and feelings. Sure, maybe there is something more desperate about Thom Yorke's moans than Josh Dooley's elongated monotones, but that boils down to character and situation. Living in England made me whine a lot more intensely than when I lived in California. The weather really is that bad. The food really is that bad. The people really are that emotionally repressed. For crying out loud, Yorke can moan all he wants, and Dooley can do his less intense thing, and both of them are still asking the same questions and feeling the same extra-sensory drabness of their existence - an existence that can be realized in London, Huntington Beach, Tokyo, or Bermuda. Wherever you live you still have to deal with the fact that reality is not the most realistic thing in the world, and that haziness is as real, if not incredibly more so than, clarity, whatever kind of perverse or destructive or enabling concept that word conjures. Some of us write songs about it - some of us a LOT of songs about it - some of us try to ignore it, some of us throw rocks at it, some of us run away from it, some of us go crazy because of it, some of us named Solomon write books about it, and some of us write obnoxious album reviews about it that say absolutely zilch. The fact, Jack, is that I like my futility and entropy. It makes that death stuff go down a lot easier. Map write pretty rock songs about nothing slash everything. Good stuff.