I Am-Sterdam

I AM-STERDAM / 'The Ins & Outs'

meteorite-slash over herengracht ‘gentlemens’ canal
where mad colours run psychedelic ripples
on the wrong side of my reflection
born beneath the sign of fire

bright lights bright cafés shimmer shimmer,
tram-lines quiver, the sound of sea in the trees
born beneath the sign of water

once hazardously wasted on a Thai stick
sat on a kerb for 45-mins straight, without moving
animation suspended, on pause, slow obliteration
struck dumb, then snap back, with no time elapsed
I must have come from someplace
just can’t remember where,
rap on the radio, lyrics connect in burning code
scattergun schmatterglum shatter-gloom encrypted
messed-up raddled, listen, saying the lines loud
soothes their quick-theft backwards into poems
born beneath the sign of the minotaur,
I Am-Sterdam

Rembrandt gazes down in ghostly stone in doublet, cap
& wistful regret, at needles, spent condoms &cold pizza,
he steps down as dark turns & the moon grows vast
freezing the city to stone, melting stone to flesh,
& we tiptoe together through Rembrandtplein
my mind made of gravel, where digital dogs howl &
sound resounds around in inpactful impactwise narrative
painting genes and bones, stonewashed jeans and stoned
through the square that puts the dam in Amsterdam
where even the bag-lady rides a bag-bicycle, &
fast-food burger-bar mothers feed kind to be cruel, where
cigarettes have health-warnings and brown energy cafés
don’t, ganja minds breathe god particles in magic potion 309
gauntlets of fat women are chewing iphones,
& there are chicks with dicks on the corner,
tres strange, born beneath the sign of aphrodite

light-years later, scanning every face on the Rokin, but
he’s returned to stone & I’m in the crummy Thorbecke
hotel skyping you home-thoughts & facebook phone-pics,
before we met my life was lived within these snippets
yet the light has dimmed, even as she shies away,
at one time you do stuff, smoke stuff, drink stuff
then do other stuff, rather than not doing stuff
a coming down, coming of age, or just coming?
there’s no time for ‘you should have known me when’,
time tells lies, there’s no time to be retrospective,
these memories you burn, & too late for new stories
so what other way to tell all these storms in golden cups,
trade away days, forget regrets, forsake mistakes
born beneath the sign of forgetting…

The Lodger CD Review

'FLASHBACKS'

by THE LODGER

(This Is Fake DIY records)

www.myspace.com/thelodgerleeds

Lodger. If you thought David Bowie, you’d be wrong. To anyone who’s ever frequented Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club or The Faversham, Lodger are endearingly ragged fey white-boys in sensible haircuts and thrift-store shirts. With Ben Siddall as the engagingly uncontrived focus, and the bands only continuity. He’s the wispy insubstantial lead voice of ‘Grown-Ups’ (2007) and ‘Life Is Sweet’ (2008), the kind of accessible voice you know you’ve heard somewhere before, but just can’t place. ‘Flashbacks’ is his first with a four-piece nucleus, expanded with various cohorts and co-conspirators, and the band’s first for This Is Fake DIY records. This time there are also strings, nice sax horn-lines, trumpet and violin solos. The structured big-production title track opens mildly, with outbreaks of mellowness, before blossoming into big choruses punctuated by Bruce Renshaw’s martial drums. There’s rippling jangle-guitar to ‘The End Of The Affair’ with smart lyrics about ‘squeeze my hand, till it cuts off the circulation in my arm’, enveloped in a balm of harmonies, accelerating into choppy rhythmic changes. These are songs of careless bedsit partings, ‘lust at the back of the bus’ that still touch all the usual bases, Stone Roses, Farm, Weddo’s, Housemartins, Postcard Records, but with some serious jiggery-pokery in the instro-mix, and Sarah’s attractive ba-ba-ba harmonies on ‘Time To Wait’ adding flurries of Yorkshire honey. The bright ‘Stand Up’ tail-ends into tasty jazzy break-ups. It’s widescreen wimp-Indie, impossible to dislike. Tunes that not so much lodge in your head, as shimmer there. Sometimes spindly, always informal, the artful Lodger is what they created Indie to be.