make it go and make it right (fire’s coming down now)

From the opening clatters and violin tension, I feel uneasy throughout this song — like everything is just about to spin off into chaos, and I love it. It feels like that overly bright, shaky feeling you would have after your second all-nighter in as many nights, stopping in at a convenience store where everything is dusty colored plastic and too close together on the shelves. This song would be playing there. The beat here is syncopated and the feeling of “slightly off” permeates. Matt Berninger’s voice is the anchor to the jumble, more sonorous and powerful than the original version of the song.

Fire To The Ground (feat. Matt Berninger) – The Forms

It’s like the empty, shiny feeling I get in the U2 song from Zooropa “Stay (Faraway, So Close),” where Bono sings about stopping in at 7-11 for a pack of cigarettes, when you don’t smoke and don’t even want to, dressed up like a car crash. This song feels like that except richer and more jittery, more out-of-sorts by a factor of ten. This isn’t even 2am fun where the night still feels young, this is 4:45am where the sunrise is coming and you just might have to work in the morning.

The Forms are a duo from Brooklyn, and have been around since 2003, with two full-length albums out. Their new Derealization EP is coming out February 15th on the Ernest Jenning Record Co label, and reworks ideas/melodies/lyrics from their past albums with different arrangements and tempos (like dropping the needle set to 45 instead of 33), and different musicians contributing. The EP features not only Berninger of The National, but also members of Shudder to Think, Dirty Projectors, Pattern is Movement and St. Vincent. Fascinating. I am drawn in by this idea of going back and mining deep within the past products of your creativity to reinvent for where you find yourself now.

Here’s the original version of the same song, pre-reworking:

Redgun – The Forms

Tour dates are here; they are going to be at SXSW and I do think I will have to seek them out amidst the Lone Stars.

[thanks Weekly Feed!]