The Eastern, Arrows (2009)

What can you say? Our poor, brave little country, is weathering yet another devastation.

This little gem of a band is from Lyttleton, at the epicenter of this tragedy. I saw them live just a month ago. And any listen to the opener to this album, "Engineer's Promise" leaves you feeling haunted, despairing and moved.

Like I turned to Mel Parsons during Pike River, something this morning made it feel totally right to listen to The Eastern. I'm overly sentimental because the poor South Island has been given such a battering recently. Regardless of where in the world I end up, the South is my home - it's just different there. The sky is bigger. The air is fresher. The mountains are more majestic. The sea is more wild. Being in the mainland just feels right. And to me this music reflects that little something special about the South. What is it about small South Island towns that embodies that spirit? It's about real people, a bond to the land and the sea and the mountains, about folks who work in and with the elements, and always have.

The band's bio says it much better than I ever could: "They bring… backpacks full of road songs, battered acoustics and no name electrics, banjo and glockenspiel, mandolin, harmonica, foot stomps and old time singing, straight from the gut, the fist and the heart… They believe in kicks and sadness, heartbreak and hope, 12 bar blues and 12 round rock’n’roll, fistfights and dust, road songs and trains, justice and freedom, holding it up and putting it down, that long lonesome sound, the river rise, the gospel plow, scratches and skips, static and hum, bleeding fingers and beating hearts... boots on the floor, dirt in the cracks, guts, harmony melody and soul, thinking and walking.... [Christchurch is] home but Lyttelton’s where the hearts is, they drink with the sailors... they play ‘cause they have to..... they play because they care, about the songs about the show about the folks they meet and the hands they shake. They play like it matters, like it’s all they know how to do, ‘cause it does and it is."

I am desperately homesick.