I want to be a light you wear around your wrist

This is one of my all time favorite albums. I've never been very good at talking about music. It's nature is a lot harder for me to articulate than other things, but I'll give it a try.

I can honestly say, completely forgoing hyperbole, that I have never heard anything like this album. It is a mix of music and noises spewing out of their instruments that I can only call almost-music. Musically, it's all about a near-dissonance that slides in between a visceral passionate drive and strange beauty.

Their songs are frantically mysterious. Frantic because, well listen to this:

Got it? Okay. Mysterious because, well you listened ot the song, right? Could you understand half of what Mark Paffi was screaming from somewhere deep inside his gut-soul? Some phrases seem to just act as another instrument, and the ones you can actually understand read like a prophecy from a mystic sitting in a temple nestled in a crack in the sheer face of a mountain you had to defy death to scale in order to sit in a cloud of burning sage and some poisonous berry that only grows in the valley below that you had to bring with you as tribute only to hear her tell you "You couldn't make me talk. Fire couldn't make me talk," in between otherworldly utterings you know are supposed to be words but linger right on the edge of actual language. You wonder if she's just taling gibberish to fuck with you, or if you really just aren't paying enough attention, and listen harder while getting caught up those noises rolling through you when she says, "Words from your lips unto the ground. All the novels that you read. All the useless information words, we throw them at each other and mix them all together to formulate an opinion. Without a second thought. My thoughts are yours. Your thoughts are mine, just divided by words. I know why I'm talking. Will you leave the light on?"

As you climb back down the rock face you ponder what she told you, at least what you understood. No, understood is the wrong term. You considered the sounds that formed constructions your brain recognized as words that sounded like they mean something important, something life-altering. Those errant phrases should make sense, at least they sound like they should. You can feel it in the palm of your hand, but you can't close your fingers to grasp the universal truth you are sure lies inside.

Only I never got the chance to climb that mountain, just the recordings some intrepid anthropologist made. The Germans brought us words like schadenfreude and Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung (the internet tells me this is their word for speed limit). Surely they have a word for the sadness that rises from the knowledge I will never be able to see Bear Vs. Shark perform live.