"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.
We start the year with a dark, ominous, swirling song - a protest song more than a decade old, about things we've mostly forgot that we were protesting then. Back when war was the worst thing we were worried about, war on the other side of the world, and what we - that extensible, all-encompassing national "we" - were responsible for.
I hope we're still angry at blowing up weddings in foreign countries. At least some of us. There's a fair number of Americans who I think would cheer.
This is Welcome to Your Wedding Day by The Airborne Toxic Event - a band named after a dark, ominous element of a great Don DeLillo novel. It's a 2011 song about a news story: this happened at least once, maybe multiple times. During the early war in Afghanistan, the US bombed a wedding party, killing many civilians, including the bride.
The song is full of cold anger, with a near-apocalyptic tone and wall-of-sound effect.
Well it's another fine day of nation building
Let's have. A. Parade.
You can dance on the graves and the bones of the children
If you know what to say
I would have liked to begin the year with something happier, but this is the luck of the alphabet. It won't always be this dark. (That's a good mantra in general, I think.)
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