1) Ahab - The Giant
In 2009 I regarded The Divinity of Oceans, Ahab's sophomore effort, to be the pinnacle of funeral doom. It captured my number one spot that year and I confidently said to anyone who cared that they were my favorite band. To expect them to retain that title for long was unreasonable. I'm too flighty to have a favorite anything for more than a month, much less three years. But here I am writing the final entry of my year end list, writing about Ahab, attempting to describe what this album means to me.
I read a lot. I depend on fiction to provide the texture my life often lacks. Sure I try to be adventurous, I try to live fully and experience what I can, but there are things I'll never see in person, emotions I'll never feel without a little help. Literature fulfills all the desires I know are beyond reach. Music does much the same thing in my life, but literature has the ability to fill in all the details, the color, while music is mostly up to interpretation. I don't think I've ever experienced the two converge before 2012... but they did in the form of The Giant.
The Giant is based on The Narrative of Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe, his one and only full-length novel. I knew this ahead of time and made sure to have a Poe collection close at hand when the vinyl arrived at my doorstep. The object was to combine literature with music, to see if Ahab had been masterful enough to capture the emotion, the broad strokes of the novel, giving a literary classic a new dimension of discovery, bringing me one step closer to actually being there on Pym's doomed voyage at sea.
I've never experienced anything like this before. I've never been so moved.
