AWmusic

Often, I think our favourite albums are ones that get you at the right time and place. Hayden’s Everything I Long For was the perfect album for me in 9th grade to moap in my room to about how my parents didn’t understand, Beirut’s Gulag Orkestar was a great album to listen to while I lived in a horrible, moldy, basement apt in Seoul, SK and it turns out, The Ghost is Dancing’s Battles On has been a perfect fit when attempting to deal with people who take their recreational activites far, far, far too seriously.

This whole time-place-mood thing probably explains why, although the band was good enough to send me their CD in April, I hadn’t written about it. It just never seemed like the time to put on the boy/girl rock/pop album. And much like last week’s pick, That’s the Spirit, it’s an album that has grown on my steadily since the spring. Otherwise, the distinctions between the two albums really couldn’t be much different.

While TtS had the whimsical nature of children’s adventure stories like The Point and The Phantom Tollbooth, tGiD’s Battles On is reminiscent of the sort of epic fights that you get into with significant others when you’re in a really unhealthy relationship, or the kind of fights that you get into with your parents during adolescence. The album has that sort of ebb and flow of one of those epic fights: talking firmly using ‘I’ statements, raising your voice a little bit, yelling, crying, yelling while crying, taking a break to calm down, resume yelling while crying and repeat. These aren’t just spats, lovers quirrels, these are the sort of fights that you remember years later — the make or break sort of fights, you survive, it signals the beginning of the end, or, I guess, it’s the end of the end.

And this, to me, is what Battles On really captures, but it makes you feel like whatever happens, whatever you said (or they said about you) you’re going to get through it, be okay, and come out even stronger. At any rate, if you’re going through some type of battle yourself and you like the poppy-’indie’-rock-boy-girl thing, then this may just be the album for you.

[mp3] The Ghost is Dancing – This Thunder
[mp3] The Ghost is Dancing – Strange Times