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28 Degrees Taurus, How Do You Like Your Love?

by dave heaton

The cover of my 28 Degrees Taurus How Do You Like Your Love? CD is looking pretty battered. It happened with a turbulent trip through the postal system, I think, and then me not taking the best care of it – stacking other CDs on top of it, or whatever. But if it were beat up on purpose, if the scratches on the cover were put there for effect, it would be appropriate. It would fit together with the abstract collage on the back cover – a moon-like object shining through some kind of mosaic of stars and glass – as a visual metaphor for what the band's music is like. They have layered, dreamy textures to their sound. I'm sure someone right now is referring to them as "shoegazers". But their music is also pleasantly rough and ragged, noisy and forceful, with Sonic Youth-ish guitars: controlled chaos.

Death is always present – not quiet, end-of-life death, but crash-your-car-in-a-ball-of-flames death. Lead singer Katrina can sing quiet and pretty, but what she sings isn't timid or restrained. On "Crash & Burn" her singing builds to a scream as she sings about crashing and dying. The first song, "Single Suicide Mode", has the chorus "I want to party / I want to drink / I want to feel this way forever / don't want to fucking think."

These songs are driven by extremes of emotion: "I want it all / all things in this world"; "I just want to do it all night / I just want to do it 'til we die." That's matched in the music by both rushes of energy and a dazzling, star-struck kind of mood (call it "psychedelic", I guess). It sounds like catching blurs of light in your eye, like feeling light-headed for no reason, or like you're standing on top of a building and have an instinctive, irrational impulse to jump.

As the album continues towards its end, all of this impulsiveness and death takes on a philosophical dimension, an existential one. This noise is pondering mortality, the uneasy question of existence. "I overheard a massacre", goes one especially unsettling line. "Freeze, Die, Come Back to Life", one song near the end is titled, and its title is sung like an incantation of some kind. The next phrase after the title is "We're on our way back home". That song is followed by one called "Endless Sea". With crashing drums, waves of guitars, and a death obsession, this album overall evokes an endless sea in more ways than one.

{http://www.myspace.com/28degreestaurus}


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