DESCRIPTION:
1. Anisette - 0:00
2. Luisitania - 9:17
3. Lawn Bowler - 12:08
4. June Leaf - 19:53
5. Arms Over Arteries - 25:03
6. Sanctioned In A Birdcage - 31:35

Listen on Spotify so that someone might get paid: https://open.spotify.com/album/5kMldfNf0pSEdjhYmF4OFS

Tropics And Meridians is June Of 44's second effort, and what an effort it is. Quite unorthodox really. In keeping with the previous album's eight minute epic opening, Tropics has a nine minute absolute rocker in Anisette. Jeff Mueller's shouting atop Fred Erskine's groovy bass, Doug Scharin's fantastic drumming, Sean Meadow's excellent guitaring matching Mueller's own. The guitars are fuzzy, crunchy, making for a bumping first six minutes.

Anisette seems to recall Mindel off June Of 44's first effort, Engine Takes To Water. There are a few guitar parts that harken back to Tooth Fairy Retribution Manifesto off of the album Rusty, by Rodan, which Jeff Mueller was a member of as well. But lyrically it seems to recall Mindel, as Mueller shouts about a man stuck in a hospital bed, suffering. The roles are reversed: Mindel had a man trying to comfort a woman in a hospital bed, and Anisette has a woman with "medicine in her hands to come home." After about six minutes, the song starts to wind down in tempo, bringing the song all the way back to the way it sounded in the first 2 minutes before fizzling out. Anisette also references the fifth track on Tropics, Arms Over Arteries, with the line: "that's a hopeless man with the arms of an artery."

Lusitania continues the band's obsession with maritime subject matter, with Mueller talking about the RMS Lusitania which was taken down by a torpedo in 1915. A nice 3 minute hard rocker.

Engine Takes To Water had a brief two minutes or so of ambient guitars and feedback in the track I Get My Kicks For You leading into Mooch. Lawn Bowler has about 1 minute and 30 seconds of ambient guitars working off of each other, and it would not sound out of place at all to hear it on something like Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht. From then on, slow, meandering, fuzzy guitars play out the song. No real developments, just noodling. It's kind of unsettling, downbeat.

June Leaf starts out with something that sounds like machinery before leading into the song. It sounds a lot like June Miller off of Engine, which is to say it rocks pretty damn well. Fred Erksine or Sean Meadows, can't tell, compliments Mueller's vocals pretty well.

Arms Over Arteries almost doesn't seem like a song at all, but somehow June Of 44 makes it work. It's a series of repeating loops of guitars working off each other while Mueller recites seemingly undecipherable lyrics. It connects to Mindel off of Engine with the lines "Nothing comes/easy easy," (In Mindel, it was "nothing could come that easy.") It's a peaceful song if anything.

Sanctioned In A Birdcage is one of the band's masterpieces, among songs like Air #17, Shadow Pugilist, Have A Safe Trip, Dear, Of Information And Belief, Anisette, and others. It begins with a conversation of somebody asking someone else if they are having fun yet, almost as if talking to the listener. The person replies, "no, I don't know," before the song gets rolling. Fred Erskine shows his mastery of the bass, Sean Meadows his mastery of the guitar, Dough Scharin's of the drums, and Jeff Mueller of songwriting and strange guitar playing. Throughout the piece, Mueller is merely strumming two strings while occasionally joining into the fray, only to return to the strumming. Of course that's the only way this can work given everything he has to say, a thesis on what it means to be alive in this world by way of talking about birds in birdcages: The birds are alive in these cages, completely safe. But being alive is more than being completely safe in a cage. It means "freedom on a different level." It's one of my favorite songs of all time