CHAPTER 82

 

#19: HOWLING BELLS

“Setting Sun”

from the album Howling Bells

Released: June 2006

 

 

It isn’t all negative. The light did arrive. While I was in London waiting for Lena to come over from Toronto and join me, we communicated most of the time online. We would liveblog certain regular radio shows, including the Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie early evening show on Radio 2. At that time the station treated its listeners and employees with a degree of intelligence and didn’t confine its output to three hundred endlessly-regurgitated and thoroughly, algorithmically predictable oldies. As a consequence you would hear all sorts of less-than-predictable things. Surburban (sic) Kids with Biblical Names, the Lionheart Brothers and Grand National were just three examples.

 

And the Australian band Howling Bells. In truth we didn’t really hear “Setting Sun” until the summer of 2008 but listening to it was like aurally witnessing the final triumph of shoegazing, albeit with that hazy, not-quite-there distance essential to all Antipodean pop. The song moves gracefully and loquaciously; its crescendi are earned, its spirit as open as the guitars’ tuning. It felt like a flag of a song that had been raised to usher us homeward. I occasionally regret that Girls Aloud or Little Mix didn’t cover the song as a dare. In the summer of 2008, “Setting Sun” indicated the rising of a new, and permanent, sunshine.