Samothrace - Life's Trade (2008)

Samothrace - Life's Trade (2008)

For this review I'd like to quote a passage from the 1998 book Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson, a Canadian-born writer who made a living teaching English in Japanese high schools, and later, inspired by Alan Booth, decided to hitchhike the country from one end to the other and document his travels. In the following excerpt, he is reflecting upon the Japanese people's strange way of approaching the English language, and recalls a chance meeting with a former student of his:

"My students in Japan were determined to reduce English to mathematical dictums that could then be reassembled...When I ran into one [of them] out of uniform in a t-shirt that read ENJOY MY BROTHER!, I challenged him to explain the phrase. It was a wager, really, because I promised him ten thousand yen if he could do it. This young man was our top student, destined for one of Japan's finest universities, and he took up the challenge with confidence. "Enjoy is the verb," he said, "my is a possessive pronoun and brother is the object. The subject is understood to be you, which makes the sentence a command phrase. The exclamation mark adds urgency." He then held out his hand for the money. "But what does it mean?" I said. He looked at me, utterly baffled, and said "Enjoy is the verb, my is a possessive pronoun, brother is the--" Needless to say, I didn't pay him the ten thousand yen and he is still bitter about it. In his mind, he did explain it and all I did was welsh on a bet."

This pretty much sums up my feelings about the fundamentally sound, well-performed, yet altogether unfulfilling doom metal on Life's Trade. Samothrace = the Japanese student (if that wasn't obvious).


Score: 6.5/10


"Awkward Hearts"