Hahaha! Happy sweet singles with good teeth on a summer evening rooftop. Things get blurry. There are grilled sausages, spin-the-bottle, tongues, more spinning. Things get blurry. Happy. Sweet. Nothing lasts. Hahaha!
What could be more footloose than a Freelance Whale?
These Freelance Whales, they're unpigeon-hole-able. The New York quintet call themselves and have been called: 'Indie' 'Rock' 'TechPop,' and, dismissively, 'fuzzed-out synths with raw Americana,' but together, what they are is an exuberant tumble of glockenspiels and banjos, harmoniums, cellos, and something called a waterphone that I had to look up* all plinking innocence, green-as-young-wine in a children-in-sun-and-grass home movie flicker. But, it's the bones, the infrastructure, holding it all up - the girders and cable of microKorg layers, MOOG lilt, and piles and piles of drums that saves these whales.
To me these two songs, Generator First Floor and Generator Second Floor, help conjure a whole Green and Pleasant place full of on-the-loose childhood with not a guardian in sight, just long days playing dress-up in uninhabited manses, parading over meadows, roaming overgrown gardens, with all the dark possibilities of lace curtains in sunny nurseries blowing from windows carelessly left open far above the gravel drive.
This is, of course, is a neighborhood peopled with playmates like Cymbals Eat Guitars (who probably live in the woods), pianist and erstwhile computer engineer Vienna Teng, The Fruit Bats, even The Weepies, who, like countrified cousins, would have come for a visit worrying they don't have the right high-top Converses, or enough JP-8000s, but they connect with the city kids through the candid vigor of musicality that they all have.
And it's against modest poets like the Weepies, though, that the Whales sink. Weepies' lyric beauty, while more rough-hewn, honest as the notebook paper it's written on, with the frankness of a wooden bowl of apples.
*A waterphone has its own colorful history involving B. Franklin and Tibet. It is related to the nail violin, says its Wiki.
Sweet, hopeful, a little worried, rather wiggly are cartoons by young Dave Walker, who himself looks all of those geekling things in his photo: swarm of curly hair and glasses for shoving up nose when thinking. He's a Scots artist doodling at Weblogcartoons. His work is dedicated to art, faith, and justice within Scotland’s cultural life. He supplies cartoons. You can upload them to your blog, your newsletter, email them about.
His FAQ title is "Why am I doing this?" which I guess he hears a lot. And the answer, and I think it's a pretty good guess, is that he like to. He's prolific, he writes The Dave Walker Guide to the Church. Arch Bishop Alan Wilson tweets him joshing him about his timely iPad cartoon, which was called "IPad Envy" in which everyone has their strapping iPads and, sigh, there you are with your puny iPhone.
