Mountains Beyond Mountains

Missing Tuesday night smackdown was a bit of a bummer. I got on my trainer and did some intervals and since it was after 8pm when I started starvation took over and I limited my session to about 1 hour of work. Earlier in the day Dan Mazz and I did a loop of Ponky nice and easy. So for what was supposed to be a challenging day of work with limited time I still managed almost 2 hours of training. I am not keeping a diary and certainly not posting daily on this site (I have no idea why) so I don't really know what I'm doing or what my plan of attack is. Not committing to a training program has been very purposeful. On any given day I can do 3 hours of exercise but more often I do about 30 minutes of terrible exercise laced with a good dose of pain. I have no energy to complain because it would be a daily occurrence. With that said, I am running more so I should kind of track what I'm doing even if it is slow. I must be fairly fit in the general sense.

The Interpol show from the weekend was outstanding. Toad's Place in New Haven is small and like the gig in Rochester the show had a bit of a pub band feel. I moved around a lot, standing up near the front for a while and then seeking better sound I moved towards the back. The speakers aren't the may west but Interpol made it work. The set list was similar to Rochester with an additional new song in the main set and "Stella Was A Diver, And She Was Always Down" added to the encore. I love that song. They ended with "Not Even Jail" again and the crowd loved it. Only one song from "Our Love To Admire", once again proving that they really didn't think much of the work. The crowd were shouting for "Rest My Chemistry" and I wondered what Paul was thinking. At one point it was deafening. I guess this one group really wanted to hear it. Overall, the Rochester gig was better. Sound was better and the crowd didn't keep chanting for songs that they would obviously not play. I wonder if it ever works? I never understood shouting requests. Its called a SetList lads!

As much as I tried to avoid grabbing an early copy of the new Arcade Fire I couldn't deal with people talking about it anymore. I don't feel bad about downloading it because I will buy a hard copy on Aug 3rd and perhaps a t-shirt at the gig that I'm going to in Boston. Premature evaluation is that the album is very good. I expected it to be good but didn't expect the new instrumentation displayed amazingly well on the song below, "Sprawl II (mountains beyond mountains)" which is fantastic and my fav from the album so far. It sounds like a song Blondie or Siouxsie and the Banshees could have sang. Regine Chassagne (Butler’s wife) sings “Living in the sprawl, Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains, And there’s no end in sight”, and I love this theme. Very emotive and catchy. Loving "Ready To Start"as well. The album is immensely exciting and I can't wait to give it many listens over the next few weeks.

Love Kel