Another Form of Relief

I need to know who I am
and what I’m going to do while I’m on Earth
I need to understand
Everything and everybody’s lives

I’m very much a skipper when it comes to listening to music. I’m constantly jumping between songs, and thanks to the joys of an iPod, rarely listen to an album in it’s entirity. It’s not often that I’ll hear the same song twice in one day as I’d rather be moving on to something else. Every so often though a song comes along that ends up being placed on repeat to an almost unbearable level. Today that has been ‘This Sentence Will Ruin/Save Your Life’ from Canada’s Born Ruffians.

I had no idea who Born Ruffians were before a few days ago when I found a couple of songs on a blog. As usual I forget which, but if you’ve posted about these guys lately, it could have been yours! I downloaded something like four songs but this is the only one that I’ve played more than twice. I’m sure the others are very good too, but it’s this one that has grabbed me. I’d like to sit here and say that I couldn’t really explain why, but I can: it pretty much sums up exactly how I feel right now.

The world has been decidedly short of slacker anthems since the loss of Pavement, so a song like this fills in the voids perfectly. Two and a half loud, noisy minutes about the things the singer wants from life (a girl, nice car, a meaning to his life) while seemingly accepting that he’s too lazy to do anything about it. This certainly isn’t an epiphany song, more one that proclaims what will never be had. At least that’s what I get from it anyway. The logical reason behind that is that if he wasn’t too lazy, he would have gone out and got these things rather sing about wanting them. The alternatative reason is that I’m projecting myself into the song, which probably isn’t the healthiest thing to do.

It’s funny, I was going to stat a regular thing on here where I wrote about songs that had some significance to me, or more accurately, songs that I could write about in some detail without falling back on writing who a band sounded like or whatever. Writing is more interesting when there’s some personal connection between the author and the subject, so I thought that might have been an interesting bit for the blog. I just didn’t envision starting with something like this.

MP3 Born Ruffians - This Sentence Will Ruin/Save Your Life (expired)

‘This Sentence Will Ruin/Save Your Life’ is taken from Born Ruffians’ self-titled debut album, which will be released in the US on October 17 on Warp Records.

Born Ruffians: Website || Myspace

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