SOTW: "Whisper to a Scream (Birds Fly)" by Icicle Works + Yes We Kang!

As the City of Angels enters the scorching season, I figure we could all use a refreshing blast of Icicle Works. "Whisper to a Scream (Birds Fly)" captures the sound of my summer, a summer boiling over in too many ways. The Liverpudlian band's one and only stateside hit, "Whisper" was released in the U.S. in 1984 with its current title (the UK Version was "Birds Fly (Whisper to a Scream)"). Record execs thought a more overt reference to the chorus would make it easier to find in record bins. "Whisper" begins with a melodic, sliding bass line and a tame guitar hook that could very well have come at the hands of Johnny Marr, or the late, great Siouxsie axe man, John McGeoch. It's the same lightsome sound that made Sixpence all that much richer with their breakout single "Kiss Me."

The song doesn't stay breezy for very long. "Whisper" builds into something totally ice age with its relentless, throbbing toms evocative of early-Spandau Ballet's forays into ice caves and primitivism (see right). Paint me down indeed. But back to our one hit wonderboys, Icicle Works, who led the anti-article transition by dropping the "The" from their name when they flipped their song title. Or more to the point (to resurrect our very old pal Walter Pater sounding a tad like our whiny, newer pal, Meredith Grey): "what is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book to me? What effect does it really produce on me?" (Incidentally, Shonda Rhimes titled a recent episode of Grey's "From a Whisper to a Scream").

Kangagi and I had hoped this summer would be a mellow and productive break from the breathless pace of the academic year. Instead, summer '08, like our SOTW, has accelerated and amplified into a succession of overindulgences, enthusiasms, sports fantasies and nightmares, must-see music, performance, art, and must-do meat-grilling and butt-bumping, saturated with all the sweat, sleeplessness and mysterious occurrences of lockjaw that make summers in El-Ay feel oh so special and taxing.

"Whisper to a Scream" emerged on an especially steamy nite of mixed feelings and mixxy occurrences. It was last Tuesday. Game 6. The Lakers were slaughtered by the Celtics, and we were drowning our collective pain with what remained of our "lucky" lambrusco. Slowly but surely, our inner tom-toms kicked up the beat and our Laker-wake morphed into a tailgate party for foxy moron's--aka Nao Bustamante and Silas Howard's--debut at Wu Ingrid Tsang's sexi art club, Wildness @ the legendary Silver Platter. [Right: foxy moron live at Wildness]

Throughout the night we still felt the sting of going down hard, of losing by a historically humiliating 39 points. But it was there on the Silver Platter's blighted version of a back patio, beneath the shadow of broken headboards, ripe trash bins and other urban detritus, that our voices stumbled upon this song:

We are, we are,
We are but your children,
Finding our way around indecision,
We are, we are
We are ever helpless,
Take us forever,
A whisper to a scream...

What was deep, collective disappointment became, simply, collective. And we knew then that we'd all somehow be OK, even though none of us has anything quite figured out just yet. - (KT)

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P.S. YES WE KANG













One of our fave sisters in the ALOTR fellowship, Laura Kang, has succeeded another ALOTR legend, Jennifer Terry, as the new chair of UC Irvine's Women's Studies department. The Anteaters have entered the era of "Yes We Kang," and in the spirit of keeping feminista fires burning bright, we at O!I can't resist dedicating this song to our idol, LK--especially ater it serendipitously rotated onto the Terry/Khan's party pod during the torch & flask-passing rituals the other day: