Eagle Seagull
Daytrotter Session - Jan 2, 2011
- Welcome to Daytrotter
- The Boy With A Serpent in His Heart
- You Can’t Call Yourself A Secret
- I’m Sorry But I’m Beginning To Hate Your Face
- You’re The Reason Why I’m Afraid to Die
Our bodies talk more than we think about, sometimes, without much in the way of actual language. We all know about this – the ways that we express ourselves with the ways we hold our arms, with the faces we contort, with our slumping, with our rigidness, with our lack of form. We say it all. Our bodies can look like fangs or give off the feel of the hide of a rabbit, without changing much. They can be as calm as a whispering lake or that same body of water being seized by a raging and forceful storm front – getting whipped and tugged, jerked and slammed. And that’s all while we can witness it, while we’re still able to recognize the signs and the changing degrees and the winds shifting course. What Nebraskan band Eagle Seagull make us understand is that we’re missing so much. There are so many conversations roaring through us that we don’t perceive as they’re happening, but the amount of information and code — those distress signals and war cries, that go on the silent record is substantial and probably could provide us with a complex or an accelerated heartbeat, or with an assortment of contusions. The big group of friends makes an enormous sound that will definitely get people coughing out the names of the Arcade Fire and Bright Eyes one too many times, but they gather so much of themselves, giving the rolling currents of disruptive living an extremely personal feel. It doesn’t take you long to know that you’re going to be experiencing their terrors and uncertainties with them. Occasionally masked in wry bits of humor – long and specific song titles give away some this – it’s just a defense mechanism, with an underlying and powerful emotional upheaval taking place in the band’s short and dynamic time with each song it makes. They sing of life’s cruel geometry and they must mean all of the sharp and often unseen angles and turns, the wild complication of the formulas and corollaries that get all tangled up in the thought process. The band makes us believe that we all have drafts in us, gaping holes or hidden cracks that allow past our skin blasts of biting wind. We have weaknesses that we cannot defend against and it all leads to a perfect storm of personal war. We’re abuzz, all the time. We’re wrecked with those individual pains and problems, joys and worries that keep us shaking and wide-awake at night, without any sort of recourse. And so we dance with them. We listen to them hum and click down our hallways as we go on with everything else.