Pod-heads (5)

Here's a kind of remarkable fact: the tunes I listen to on my iPod are, in some sense, determined by weather conditions. I don't know why, but as soon as spring lurks around the corner for example, Bloc Party's first album (Silent Alarm) almost automatically announces itself through my earbuds. Not that any of the lyrics on this album directly refer to most people's second favourite season, but still: listening to this album sounds like spring to me...

Summer, on the other hand, is mostly reserved for punk and hardcore. Probably because for me this means wearing shorts, faded rock t-shirts and Vision skate shoes (which differs from the other seasons in the sense that it's not always appropriate to wear shorts). Nothing beats walking to the supermarket with old school positive hardcore blasting through the speakers, making you look like a dork, singing along ("This is our time!") and pointing fingers. Index fingers, that is, the traffic aggression finger is reserved for other occasions.

Autumn and winter are reserved for heavy metal and post-rock. Especially the latter genre succeeds in capturing the spirit of the darker seasons. Yesterday, while I was compiling music for a friend, I realized that my Red Sparowes (sic) season started again. Because now that the days are shortening and the mercury thermometer seems less enthousiastic than a few months ago, I tend to listen to one of my most precious records: Every red heart shines towards the red sun, a post-rock classic, full of reverbing guitars building up to gorgeous crescendos.

Rather than reviewing this album, I will end this post with the story behind the band's name, another example of how the pages in our history books are bloody red, but not always read...

May 23, 1958: Mao Tse Tung initiates the “Great Leap Forward,” his second five-year plan for the People's Republic of China. In addition to imposing impossibly high quotas on mainland farmers,the Chairman insists that the country’s “four greatest evils” - rats, mosquitoes, flies and sparrows - must be exterminated in order to maximize production.

Villagers are instructed to scream and bang pots and pans to keep the sparrows in flight until the birds die of exhaustion. Soon, the sparrow population is drastically reduced, leaving no natural predator for the country’s locusts - which proceed to decimate China’s crops. The result is possibly the worst famine in human history. Between 1958 and 1961, as many as 43 million Chinese die of starvation.

Meanwhile, local government authorities falsify agricultural reports in order to avoid Mao’s often senseless wrath. Soldiers are dispatched to villages to find grain that the peasants are accused of hiding. Thousands of villagers are tortured and murdered in the search for grain stores that never existed. When they run out of bark and grass to eat, peasants in some provinces resort to cannibalism.

If you ever get the chance to see them live, please do.

Unless you are allergic to goosebumps.