Category: Culture

The stuff that makes life worth liv­ing.

interventions.jpg

This album is absolute­ly amaz­ing. I might have said that about some oth­er albums some­time in the past but I was lying or under the influ­ence of some sort of mind alter­ing sub­stance. In fact I’m under the influ­ence of a mind alter­ing sub­stance right now. That sub­stance is, of course, this won­der­ful­ly vibrant and unas­sum­ing band called The For­mat. They come from Ari­zona, a won­der­ful state that is full of intel­li­gent peo­ple very sim­i­lar to those from Indi­ana. This is proven by the sim­ple fact that, much like Indi­ana, Ari­zona does­n’t change time­zones twice a year.

The First Sin­gle is my favorite song on Inter­ven­tions and Lul­la­bies. Not only is the tune heart­felt and pop­py, the lyrics speak to me like no oth­er song I have ever heard, ever. This is no under­state­ment. For those of you who know me this lyric should let you in on just how weird­ed out I was to hear my feel­ings spo­ken with fer­vor and sin­cer­i­ty by some­one else.

you know the night life is just not for me
cause all you real­ly need are a few good friends

The For­mat speaks the thoughts and feel­ings of all its band mem­bers, giv­ing lit­tle slices of each mem­ber’s per­son­al­i­ty in the lyrics. Nate and Sam are the main guys, but they have a bevy of oth­er band mem­bers whose names you will become acquaint­ed with once you go buy this CD. Nate’s [I think its Nate] clear tenor is friend­ly and like­ly appeals to coo­ing wet-eyed emochil­dren espe­cial­ly with lyrics that could be inter­pret­ed as quite melan­choly.

For me though, the music and the lyrics aren’t melan­choly at all. Oh sure, many of the songs are about how dif­fi­cult life can be and have a feel­ing of weari­ness about them at times even cyn­i­cal… but the music and the way Nate sings remind me of me, or the way I think of me at least. Rogu­ish, wry, deter­mined and a sort of droll humor or sar­don­ic blitheness. Yeah I think that describes me pret­ty well, sar­don­ic blitheness.

Since I’ve made this review about me instead of about The For­mat I’ll kill it here. Just go get the album.