Baby, Are You Using It?

Life Without Buildings “Liberty Feelup (Live)” – Life Without Buildings recorded a fantastic and distinct album, toured a little bit, and split up all in the span of a couple years at the beginning of this decade. They quit while they were ahead and can claim a spotless legacy, and while that’s quite cool and sorta romantic, it’s incredibly frustrating just the same. There’s a certain magic to the sound of Life Without Buildings’ music, but there’s no good reason for the audience, much less the band themselves, to imagine that they weren’t capable of topping or at least matching that sort of inspiration. As a fan/consumer, it’s awfully convenient when an artist’s body of work is a one-stop-shopping deal, but how do we know when we couldn’t have it so much better? Why are we all so frightened of the valleys that accompany the peaks of the creative process?

“Liberty Feelup” (or as Sue Tompkins speak-sings it, “Liberty Feeeeelup”) is the one “new” song on the band’s forthcoming live album, and it’s so good that it breaks my heart all over again. It sticks to the basic formula of Any Other City, but it doesn’t seem at all like they were lacking in ideas. If anything, it suggests that they abandoned their brilliant personal style a bit too soon. Tompkins still seems as though she’s communicating the breadth of the human experience with every cryptic, repeated line, and the music ebbs and flows with their characteristic blend of serenity and urgency. Like the rest of their work, the song sounds tossed off but incredibly passionate and brave as Tompkins seems to stare down the inevitabilities of life and death while grinning like a loon. (Click here for the official Life Without Buildings site.)