"Dance Card" by Art History Brewing, American Brown Ale
This almost four year old brewery follows a common thread in today's American brewing scene - homebrewer grows into professional via Siebel Institute, joins forces with some veteran brewers, puts out great international and historical styles while keeping it true to their homebrewing roots. The American Brown Ale came out of that American homebrewing scene, with turned up bitterness and alcohol content. Both are well showcased here, while the hops bring in a little bit of English Brown flavor for me, with an earthy herbalness that stood out.
"Dance for the Dead" by Cloud Cult, The Meaning of 8 While I led into this project with a very deep metal riffing theme for the Instagram post announcement, metal is not the only theme here. "Dark" represents an evocation of an assortment of related themes and tropes for this project: death, grieving, broken hearts, pain, and a general appreciation that not all things are well all the time and we can sit in these darker emotions and moments and learn from them. "This is the dance that brings the dead to the living. Just say "I miss you every day, you know."" Repetition of this line and "Can you hear them come?" later in the song both serve as a challenge to me, that you are empowered to bring the dead into your life if you want, just by evoking these words, and then the song challenges you to hear them. For me, that challenge is one of learning lessons from the dead. They are not really gone, except physically.
