8823

From Spitz's classic era, "8823" — the title a Japanese number pun reading as "hayabusa," the peregrine falcon — is the band in their most exhilarating form: a driving rock track where the clean guitar distortion actually distorts, the tempo pushing forward with real urgency, and Kusano's vocals riding the rhythm section's momentum rather than floating above it as they do on the band's more ethereal recordings. The production is rawer than some of their polished work, the mix slightly forward and loud in a way that communicates physical freedom without effort. Lyrically the song reaches for flight, movement, the experience of velocity as emotional state rather than metaphor for anything more explicable. Spitz songs often resist translation into clear narrative, images working associatively rather than argumentatively, and this is among their most impressionistic — the emotional content arriving through sound before sense, understood in the body before the mind locates the words for it. Open window, empty road.