Summer Bird At the email cafe I clicked on 'His Name is Alive', a Michigan area band I've enjoyed that mixes ethereal 4AD sounds with studio wizardry invoking everything from gospel to the Beach Boys. From their site: The SUMMER BIRD EP is a special sneek preview of the forthcoming HIS NAME IS ALIVE LP, containing two album tracks and two non-Lp B-sides.The A-side (track one) SUMMER BIRD is a 1970's singersongwriter flavored track written about lost love using Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge's complete destruction of Cambodia as a metaphor. A quick reference to Jackson Browne's Running on Empty serves as a reminder of the Communist's original goals of becoming solely reliant on their own natural resources, ending the undeclared war that the United States had started after branching out from Vietnam, and also as a reminder of how a beautiful well-meaning dream could quickly become a nightmare of unimaginable proportions. http://www.hisnameisalive.com/ I'm not sure whether this will be topical political pop or self-indulgence. I'll have to publish a list of pop songs and groups that reference Cambodia at some point, from SPK to the Dead Kennedys. Downloading the MP3 now. Hope this doesn't suck...

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