“Twenty-Nine” - Christmas Island, (Nineteen) [7”] (2009)
An easy choice. I heard this on MBV yesterday and was totally hooked, and have been listening to it all day today. I love it for both the sound and the lyrics. The music is a little lo-fi but not over-the-top, with a surfy Dick-Dale-amped guitar and a driving kick-drum rhythm. (I was surreptitiously drumming this on my sandwich container during lunch today.) I think it kind of falls apart during the bridge that starts with “Where did the time go?”, but then it gets it back together in short order.
As for the words, I think they capture really well the mixed feelings about age that set in during your mid-to-late twenties (which I myself recently entered). Sometimes when I think about it I feel incredibly old, and sometimes I feel incredibly young. I love the interchanging of the words “I’m already twenty-nine” and “I am only twenty-nine”, and I think he’s right about what a difference love can make on your perspective:
Where did the time go?
I’m already twenty-nine
And what do i have to show?
I’m already twenty-nine
…
When your hand’s in mine
I am only twenty nine
All the stars align
I am only twenty nine
