Walking Bicycles

  The Walking Bicycles discography that I have is greatly treasured. I feel very privileged to have it down and swirling about in my head. They play relatively rare. It gives time for one to explore more deeply the music that is out now.  The time you would spend listening to what is new from them instead is spent longer on their present work.  Every show I see is a mission accomplished and forever remembered.  I hear it in the right moment, its empowering. There is a reason why the word "punk" is always in their description.  It is music for underdogs by those who lived as such. There is this park near where I live they got these elliptical machines. On the ipod they randomly played and I worked out to the entire To Him That Wills The Way LP. Other tracks find their way into daily mental soundtrack or randomly on the ipod. There is this .....maturity that stretches into their earliest works.

  Perhaps it's the 70's inspired artwork that came with the two newest releases, but there is that cool dark 70's vibe....the way movies now like to portray them.   70's noir...John Wick's muscle car .......driving to Walgreens to pick up mom's meds.  Damn, I need to stop mercilessly drowning my own metaphors in the bathtub like that.  It was a bubble. No 70's muscle car all in Bauhaus black....puuf! Just me in mum's van picking up her meds listening to Walking Bicycles along the way. I am rabidly getting into Fat Cat and ESP. These last few gigs I saw they were playing more and more of their new music. Hellz yeah I was into it.  It is perhaps ESP that I recall telling Julius in some long winded way how awesome it is. I throw that word a lot but I mean it always.  ESP was a further refinement, smooth and still intense.  And I know this is just subjective speculation, I hear traces of GO? in this one song. (I tried to look for the upside down question mark on my keyboard, really I did.)The path that was suggested in GO? is bulldozed, plowed and paved in ESP. It's refined, smooth and still powerful. Its a path finally taken and owned. Fat Cat reminds me of To Him That Wills.  I place it comfortably among my favorites of the band.  And these impressions so crudely expressed are but placeholders. Early chances at reaching wider audiences they turned down. And I can see why. They were not for those audiences. Theirs is for an older wiser.....cooler crowd even back then. An innate maturity comes with their punk. They have been tested by the hardest times. Defiance from a place of experience is scarier, tougher. There is a reason why my mind drifts to playing their music. In all scenarios it's light in the dark with the burn power of a laser, a burning simmering ember with a promise to burn it all down. I cam down from that elliptical machine feeling like that forward burning wick, but I was going to shower first.
Zig