A few days ago, the mayflies started hatching here, along the Iowa/Illinois bend of the Mississippi River. They're as thick as a fog as you get into the late afternoon hours, when the sun's setting and they're getting testy or hungry. You can drive through them, with a hand out of the open window, getting pelted in the palm every half-second. They seem like such improbable and tragic creatures - here to do little good other than being fish food, but they seem to be enjoying their short existences and their mad-dash sprees of flight around these parts for the few precious days that they get.
It's that kind of furious flurry of energy and fluid motion, that lucid accounting of needing to be happy for what you get that pours out of the music that Philadelphia group, Bleeding Rainbow, makes. It's anxious and propulsive. It comes at you head-on, ready to create a collision, ready to bust heads and see what kind of confetti will pop out when the impact pounds. They are songs that are meant for the coffee-addled, for those just tripping on movement, ready to explode out of their seats and get going, impulsively and wholeheartedly.
The songs tend to celebrate the spirit of running on very little sleep, on maximizing the waking hours by ignoring the ones that are supposed to be resting hours. The nights are just forgotten about - powered through by calling for another round of drinks, at the bar that never closes. It's a feeling of pushing open the tavern doors and being blinded by the blinding yellow light and rather than heading right how to bed to sleep the day completely away, everyone looks at each other, they shrug and decide to hit the diner for bloody Marys, some eggs and toast and then it's off to the beach for some morning swimming.