Fire, Fire, Fire!

Song: "Two Magpies" & "Sing the Changes"

Artist: The Fireman (Paul McCartney & Youth)

Album: Electric Arguments

From: UK

Year: 2008

I had an incident with fire once.  It was my junior year of college and I was pouring hard spaghetti in a boiling pot of water around twilight.  A noodle slipped inside the stove/underneath the Williams Sonoma pot and caught fire.  Skinnier than I feather I still managed to wreak havoc in the kitchen. That is when I turned to my roommate and screamed "Fire! Fire! Fire!" Each "Fire!" louder than before because my roommate clearly did not understand what "Fire!" meant the first two times.  I thought the stove was going to explode.  By the time I turned back to the pot, the fire was gone, noodle black, roommate laughing.  

A new type of fire is The Fireman's third album, Electric Arguments.  Here we listen to the flames of multiple concoctions that make these two brilliant artists boil.

Electric Arguments cover art:

"Two Magpies"

Why, when I hear the Paul McCartney influences in this song do I think of The Floorwalkers, a Columbus, OH based band?  This is discouraging.  Not for all, but for me.  I don't know, maybe it's because I never saw The Beatles live.  Electric Arguments, is based on an Allen Ginsberg poem, "Kansas City to St. Louis", so back then.  I hadn't even heard about The Fireman until recently, though now that I have, I realized I must've been living happily under a rock.

"Two Magpies" has an easygoing feel- good for a road trip, drinking coffee on a Sunday morning, or cleaning around the xmas tree.  It's good for anything, fuck, who am I to judge where or why you should listen to Sir Paul.   Granted four stars by The Times and Rolling Stones, The Knight and Youth pull of a stellar album that enables one to feel many things when listening.  What do I mean by this?  Each song sounds so completely different than the previous, you just have to question their influences in current pop/rock music and how long the recording took place.  

For example, "Sing the Changes", the next track on Electric Arguments, is so U2ish I swear Bono was in the room with commentary.  Wide exclaimed messages of :CHANGE: and :PEACE: are still being tried by the duo; because sadly the message wasn't understood 40 years ago.  "Sing the Changes" is a stadium song, ready to fill arenas with doobie smokers and "angel headed hipsters".  Acoustic and electric guitars join to what appears to be a dulcimer, simmering the first seventeen seconds like a pot of precious gold.  The duo are the miners that never stop.  They dig and dig for new waves in music, humoring travels of communication,mocking alias', and voicing ideals because they can.  And we love them for it.  

just because...