13 & God
02. Men of Station
13 + God, the album, is a group solution to settling the inner self and its oddly-cut angles, an exercise in human puzzle-piecing seen through the eyes of history's hindsight. Adam and Markus trade words that first evoke the blind earnestness of youth, then chronicle its gradual leaching out by the loss of the luck and the sink of realisation- all shooting stars, superman stride, climbing bills and death-by-routine. In the bittersweet opening song, `Low Heaven', the two voices echo one another over a fading clarinet, a slow-skittering beat, and gritty distorted piano: "They're threatening their lucky stars to shoot." By `Soft Atlas' - a track that pulses with punched-out drums only to be levelled by subtle guitar pluck and vocal harmony - Adam is questioning whether or not the earth has completely fallen free of its axis, left to roll unattended into some dark corner of nothing. And just before the record ends, on the icy, seven-minute, cello-driven masterwork `Superman on Ice', we're given the most poignant image yet: "There are footprints embraced far out on the frozen lake face/Depressed and kept from quite some cold ago/And they look brave, dangerous, manmade/The sort of mark one can make on the world".
Release Date: April 18th 2005