A friend who i have mentioned a few times in this blog was also responsible for turning me on to #lungfish . His bedroom was directly off the kitchen of our Elmwood village apartment and quite a few times as I was raiding the coffee pot I heard this album spilling out of his room. Eventually I asked him who it was and bought a copy for myself. He recounted seeing the band live, something I've always been jealous of. Lungfish play mesmerizing post punk, their repetitive riffs with a spoken - sung art damaged vocalist seemed very urban to me. At the time I was smitten with NYC (where my roommate had been living when he caught the band) and this disc was like a soundtrack to my romanticized version of inner-city life. The album was released on D.C.'s Dischord records so it had an elite pedigree without even hearing it. As it would turn out the vocalist Daniel Higgs (credited on this album as A. Astronomo Erdman) was an influential tattoo artist. Something I didn't know until years into my tattooing career. It breathed new life into this disc for me and I've revisited and marveled at all the interconnected webs of life. Some seen and some unseen. Some obvious forces, some subconcious. I wonder if somehow his tattooing permeated his music and eventually nudged that path for me. As a pragmatic I don't really buy that stuff (I had tried getting an apprenticeship years before I heard this album in 1996) but the romantic in me loves the idea of that plotline.
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