Swooping amongst the skyscrapers, deftly avoiding even a wing brace against the corner office. The crispness of the night you can feel as dew on your skin wiping itself off as the lights of a Hong Kong night soak–no, burn–you in their glory the closer you get.  Those lights: the sun to a modern day Icarus. Get too close, and they’ll burn that freedom you feed from and have you blinded by the pursuit of rubber bands, a cubicle and the promise of how good the office supplies smell as your stature rises.  Nabuma Rubberband is a track about: 

Voiceless men
The heartache they feel
For being born at the wrong place
At the wrong time
With a wrong fate

Though using ‘men’ as  a global stand-in for gender, the track sinks into the way exposure and entry into the capitalistic market system of SUCCESS, SUCCESS, MOTHERFUCKING SUCCESS! strips us. It makes us voiceless, takes our ruffled, wildkin feathers and smooths them into place in some faux highborn fashion.  Little Dragon trill that quiet woe at the highest level, but AIMES amplifies it in all the right ways. AIMES has a knack for traversing the lines of cynicism and some kinda hope, something he showed as early as 2011’s simple, but subversive ‘Is a Good Friend?’ (which knocked me for a loop on my definitions of friendship). Here, AIMES opens the track with a fucking stellar introduction that sounds like the bird’s gasp for life, and keeps that bird’s hope alive until its freedom abates.

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