Artist of the Day: Sun Airway

Sun Airway's debut album, Nocturne of Exploded Crystal Chandelier, was the ultimate "nostalgia" album.  The albums transcending and dream like atmospheres, its hazy yet catchy choruses, and its passive aggressive nature make it an album that only reminds you of old things.  Even though the hazy and dream like atmospheres created on Nocturne of Exploded Crystal Chandelier reminded you of all your old, beautiful, and vague dreams, even though the strained and distorted singing made you feel like you were flipping through the pages of all your old scrapbooks, and even though the albums soaring and borderline seductive choruses reminded you of all your favorite memories, it is easy to say the album was lacking one distinct quality: a quality that made us actually remember it.  Even though NOECC was the ultimate nostalgia album, it lacked the musical quality that would make us remember it in the distant future. So even though NOECC was an album that allowed us to "remember," it lacked the necessary qualities that would make us think of it as a memorable album; an album that we could get nostalgic about.

Artist Of The Day & Album Review: Sun Airway: Nocturne of Exploded Crystal Chandelier

Album Rating: B+

On the season finale of the first season of "Mad Men," main character and American icon Don Draper makes a sell pitch for "The Wheel" or what he renamed "The Carousel." The way Draper sells this "photo wheel" or "slideshow" is nothing short of incredible though. Draper begins by describing the word nostalgia. Draper describes nostalgia as "delicate but potent", as a "twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone," "the pain from an old wound," and "something that takes us to places we have never been before." He describes this nostalgia while his "carousel" is showing pictures from throughout his life: it shows him kissing his wife at his wedding, it shows him playing with his kids when they were very young, it shows him doing his job, and hell, it even shows him when he wasn't even Don Draper. This nostalgia that Draper defined is both can be both positive and negative (Draper's family is falling apart as he shows this slideshow), it can be both painful and new, it can take us places where we have never been before, but most importantly this nostalgia makes us feel a unique feeling and makes us think in ways that we have never thought before. This nostalgia that Draper defines almost puts us our lives on the "Carousel" that he was trying to sell, something as powerful as this nostalgia spins our life in so many directions that we almost have no control over that all we can do is sit back and enjoy its delicacies or we can cry from the old wounds it presents. But the most important thing is that this carousel of nostalgia exists and we ride on it with every powerful emotion of almost every single day.