Birthday booty tally:

2 mix CDs
1 office-based cake
1 parental monetary bequeathment
1 dinner
1 intense photographic triptych
2 homemade cards
2 blog comments
1 pot muffin
several voicemails
many drinks

Hooverphonic, Blue Wonder Power Milk

Hooverphonic�s sophomore album wouldn�t come out in the US until late 1998, but I was able to get my hands on an import that summer. From the get-go, it spoke of melancholia and conclusion: the opening of �Battersea� spoke to summer�s end better than my bad poetry or any number of Blue Moons on the porch could. I listened to this song a lot while preparing, with equal parts trepidation and exhilaration, for my trip to the UK to study in London for a term. So what if London was a cop-out study abroad program for kids who didn�t want to deal with a different language or mess with the Third World? I was enough of an Anglophile to know that I�d love it there, enough of an Iowa boy to be anxious about the change of venue. I clung to the bittersweet rush that Battersea provided as I finished my summer job in Appleton and headed to Grinnell to spend a week packing and getting drunk with Mark and Wes.

It wasn�t until I had been in London for about a month that I thought of Hooverphonic again. After an Orb concert at Royal Albert Hall (an incredible experience, despite being sequestered up in an opera box and under the influence of no substances whatsoever) a kid in the lobby thrust a postcard in my hand advertising an upcoming trip-hop extravaganza at London University featuring Hooverphonic, Moloko, and a couple other bands. I bought tickets the next day. I couldn�t rally anyone else to go with me, but I was content to take the train down there myself. The show was in the student union of London University, where I would see Elliot Smith a month later. The room was the perfect size, and I secured a space up front, and watched as the room was drenched in blue light and the band (a full, live band) took the stage; Geike Arnaert all of nineteen years old, her stage presence still somewhat awkward. After the show I went into the lobby where the band was autographing CDs. Alex Callier�s fiancee was from Florida and gave me a free Hoverphonic yo-yo because I was an American too. I took the yo-yo and the CD and leapt onto the Tube a happy boy indeed.

I spun that autographed CD a lot over the course of the term, as fall turned into winter and I returned from London to an American Midwest barren with deep freeze. Everything about this album is as cool and steely blue as the cover photo, but there is room in the palette for emotional humanity: the mournful french horns in the breakup song �Eden�; the trenchant strings that open �Battersea�; the way you can hear Geike�s breath catch after she sings the poignant last lines of �Renaissance Affair�; the way her dreamy falsetto soars over �Tuna��s chorus; the heartbreaking cascade that is the string arrangement in �Magenta�. That last song especially kills me every time I hear it, and I�m suddenly back there, in late-autumn 1998 London, trudging along Gloucester Road at midnight to palliate my hunger pangs with some doughnuts from Hart�s. There�s a lot of music that reminds me of that city and that time, and you�re probably going to suffer through my effusive paeans to all of it. Add this to the pile, then.

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