Fellow Chicago band Blind Equation played right before Your Arms Are My Cocoon. The two bands toured Asia last year together and often feel like they meld well, going hand in hand. Playing their cybergrind tracks, some old some new, they coated the audience in digital bliss. It was as if it was ripped from the screen of an old 2009 MySpace profile page. It provided a perfect preemptive feeling for the set after, awaiting death.

the rabbit is born, innocent and sweet.

Distorted speech spoken through a Software Automatic Mouth echoed out into a loosely packed Gabe’s, introducing the birth of the rabbit. Clad in wedding gowns and emo haircuts, gentle guitar riffs opened around thrashing screams and saxophone. Following the glowing arc of energy, a fevered buzz passed around between band and audience members with the set composed of vibers, jumpers, and crowdkillers alike. I got bonked in the head, which is the hardest knock to the noggin I’ve taken since, poetically, the last time Your Arms Are My Cocoon was at Gabe’s. Bright poppy synth tracks blared in between songs, a transition both musically fractured and bizarrely energetic. Golden spotlight reflected around the saxophone, shining over the bell and glittering off brass keys. Circling the roar of drums and screams, it threw out riffs after runs into arpeggios, a point of brightness guided within noise.

i am sorry.
this rabbit is mine.
our love is mine.
this city is on fire and there is nothing i can do.

The saxophone bound the band together for the duration of the set, a warm accompaniment weaving something sentimental within and around the frenetic energy, before softening into a muted lull. A forlorn duet between sweet bells and a gentle guitar cut through somber air, building once more into hyper thrashing. Energy ebbed and flowed from miserable outcry and a gentle sweet melancholy, traversing through the quiet despair as music confronted pain and past with scattered cries. The sweetness is born from sadness.

Sweet nostalgia gives us a reason to reminisce through sepia days lit in summer sun and Nintendo consoles. Beneath the gilded layers of that fuzzy warmth lives a deep yearning, a bitter regret for the youth passed by. Your Arms Are My Cocoon, built from a teenage bedroom, reaches past false comforts of bygone warmth. They weave their yearning by collapsing into the underlying despair haunting that bedroom, each song blaring a torrent of past agony into the Gabe’s upstairs.

Bleeding in that halcyon feeling, I was reminded how miserable the youth I yearn for was, how days tumbled over each other into pathetic years of anxiety and frustration. That sadness metamorphosed, it evaporated off my stained sweater while dripping down into my socks. Around the music intertwining present and past, the acidic nostalgia smoothed the bitter edges to sweetness. Your Arms Are My Cocoon embraces the scarred stain, a memory of how sadness is born, is changed, but never dies.

the rabbit is dead. the person i once loved is gone. if only i had the guts to stay.

Here this rabbit is dead. Here this music is gone.

Again we brave the bitter chill, to hop along beside ourselves back to our burrows.

The post Your Arms Are My Cocoon: birth/rabbit/death in Iowa City appeared first on KRUI Radio.