Outside the doors today there's a cruel reminder that we don't get everything, sometimes very little of what we want. There's a clear glaze of ice and snow covering most of everything and, while we're getting into the middle part of November here in the Midwestern states, it's still reason enough for us to cry foul and bitch and moan. It's too soon and we'd just rather not. We don't want to be here. We want to be where the furnaces aren't kicking on every few minutes already, fending off the chilly winters of an unwanted season. We'd like to close our eyes and be zipped away to some place not all that far removed from here, a place that existed just days ago.
We'd like to be blindfolded and pushed out the door, grumpily braced for 18-degree temperatures and mean-spirited winds, only to feel room temperature sunlight on our arms. We'd like to be pulled into an alternate universe that shakes you out of your conventions and makes you feel as if you're going to be out of provisions in just a few short days if you don't start rationing. It's a place where we're hunting down and cooking our own meat, where we're responsible for feeling happy and for staying alive. No one else is doing it for us. We have to rely on our own skills and wits. If we need fruit, we'll need to patiently wait for the fruit tree to grow and bear it.
The music of Salt Lake City's L'anarchiste gives us these sensations that could be read as awakenings - making us understand what it means to be here now. It's about the stream that we have forgotten we can hear rushing from our backyard. When attention is paid to it, its volume cuts to us like the healthy call of a locomotive searing through a crossing. Lead singer and songwriter Rob LeCheminant creates these lush landscapes that suggest that we're elsewhere and we shouldn't be. He writes what can easily be heard as naturalistic songs of regrowth and blossoming - recognizing the dirt and the water, the grass and the sky and thinking about what it means to be turned loose in that context. It's about finding that we're in way over our heads, but then discovering that we can breath underwater, through fire and without so much as knowing the difference, if we just let go and sink.