Sometimes it comes like this. I'm hunched over my keyboard in the blue glow of the monitor, head in hands, fingers in hair, the music blasting deep into my skull. It has to happen like this. I run and run to try to catch the spirit of the album, the spirit of the word, the life of a joke, everything. Allowing depths of selflessness where the music becomes both soundtrack and cocoon, then trying to emerge, a butterfly from the crysalis, to write about it. Sometimes it comes like this.

It's a cool place there-- lonely drumbeats, hollow voices, touches of moonlit horns. Geike and Alex Callier's vocals call forth in a lazy embrace, wisping through elliptic lyrics like smoke from an opium pipe. It summons daydreams of rainy european streets reeking of reluctant despair. Voices come and voices go, bits of old records, unknown samples, sounds, some apperaring for a moment and gone, some deemed to return like an addiction. Autumn is here and it speaks to the emotion of the fireplace, snow and your smoky breath wisping through your eyelashes.

Is love like this, a hopefully full cup of despair? Will the moan of cellos accompany lifetimes of dismembered moments and intoxicated fate? Oh, Hooverphonic, you fill my rainy days with the delicious sentimental wonder of all of the chilly half- remembered autumn days that litter my past. For your occasional moments of funkiness and your softcore drum-n-bass beats, you still drive the heartbeat groove deep, baby. Uh-huh. Look at Callier, dipping his fingers into wacky samples and fukked-up sounds! Go, you crafty mutha! It's a sublime sort of thing people, for ingestion when relaxing, having sex, or driving silently through the night. Sometimes it comes like this.

-James P. Wisdom