I found a tiny CD player in the garbage about a week ago, and stuck it on the shelf next to my bed. A couple of days later, in a spindle of random discs, I found a old burned copy of Riot on an Empty Street amidst a bunch of unlabled CDs.
(the google image search; click for full size)
I haven’t listened to this album all the way through since it came out six summers ago. It still hangs together beautifully in all of the ways you’d expect the second Kings of Convenience album to. Quiet, often hushed, sometimes poignant and sometimes almost raucous (“I’d rather dance with you than talk with you”). It’s almost unbeatable for a mid-afternoon doze in a sunny room with the windows open.
The payoff, for me, is the penultimate track, “Gold in the Air of Summer:”
Kings of Convenience – “Gold in the Air of Summer”
In a summer where it’s often been too hot to even sleep at night, where I’ve gotten a rash from moving apartments in the August heat, it’s pleasantly bittersweet to lie in bed at night, listening to this, and knowing that soon it will be too cold to keep the windows open at night. I listen to the winds preceding a final summer thunderstorm and wonder if my friends here have their windows open and are listening, too.
