I gave the album a couple of devoted headset listens last night in the dark in my Austin hotel room, and I’m really moving now from disparate impressions of particular tunes to a sense of the lay of the land, as it were. Mike Timmins is right: a couple of these songs grab you right away, but overall it does require patience and careful listening. I had noted the Christian mythology and eschatology implicit in “Cicadas” but I now see those themes winding through the entire album – “Stranger Here” especially – which I’m beginning to regard as…sorry about this, it’s my formal training…a “work.” I began to construct out of the unfamiliar sounds of the Chinese musical instruments and music itself, out of the atonality and rawness of some of that, a whole-blooded ambiance of sorts – and I now sense a countercurrent of recent Chinese political and social history winding through it as well. Three main currents, the political, the mythic or eschatological, and the deeply personal narrative stance of some of them, especially “Renmin Park” itself, suggest a kind of rose-and-vine image as if holding up [i]Renmin Park[/i]‘s formal structure. Plenty to work with here, and more and more I am also coming to view this album as the culmination of ATEOPT’s unfinished business.

So no sooner do I start thinking about the album as a whole than I start listening to it again on my laptop headset today en route from Austin to New York, and I guess I just had my head cocked the right way so that “Stranger Here” – the closest thing to a traditional CJ shitkicker on the download – really nailed me. I must’ve played it ten times on that flight. Oddly enough, the studio version is more energetic than any of the two live versions Ive heard. I’ve also begun to get a slightly better feel for “Sit Sadly by Your Side,” mainly because the treatment of the song on the album is, similarly, a little more energetic than the live versions I’ve heard. “Cicadas” still really grabs me – moreso now than yesterday or the day before. This one really grows on you.

Plenty to work with, think about and with which to fall in love. And I already dearly love this album, but I also know I’ve barely scratched its surface. What an achievement.

Incidentally, is it just my cataracts getting in the way of reading the credits or is Jeff Bird simply not on this album at all?