Manalight Reborn - Why It Was Forgotten

So turns out I've been away for...a long time. Kind of got side-tracked from Manalight right before the school year ended, so this has not been checked out in I'd say 4 good long months. However, fear not, I have found Manalight once more and am going to willingly begin working on it rigorously once again. I know not too many people check this anymore, but I am going to start getting them to check it again. Hence the title, Manalight Reborn. It shall rise from the ashes once again...
Quite a lot of things have occured since my last post, first of all, U2 is no longer my favourite band. It is my second favourite now. Muse has become my favourite these days. It began, really, 1 month into summer vacation, my older brother told me he had bought tickets to see Muse live on August 3rd, 2006. I thanked him, of course, but at that moment, Muse had been a band I had only "kind of liked." To show just how little I knew about it, I only had 3 songs of theirs on my ipod at the moment. I was pissed at this, and immediately began listening to them via brother's ipod, who just so happened to have all 4 albums. 'Origin Of Symmetry,' 'Showbiz,' 'Absolution,' (Absolution is by far their best album in my opinion, the video that is up now is from Absolution, its one of my favourite song of theirs, Hysteria) and the album that the tour was out for - 'Black Holes & Revelations.' Not only did he have these 4 albums, he also had two albums of B-Sides called 'The Hulaballoo Soundtrack,' Disc 1 and 2. So anyway, I began listening at first to Black Holes & Revelations, and quickly fell in love with the band. Their latest album is very political, just about every song has political references, especially the song Take A Bow, as well as Assasin. There is also the hit single here in the U.S., Knights of Cydonia. "No one's gonna take me alive, time has come to make things right. You and I must fight for our rights, you and I must fight to survive." These words are the key part of the song, very powerful ones, also. The video for the song is interesting, it has a nice story, especially if you like Cowboy stories. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV1bRfLHA3A - A link to the video of Knights of Cydonia)
After I had just about memorized the songs of Black Holes & Revelations was when I began to seriously start to listen to Muse. The next album to listen to thoroughly was Absolution. I must say, if you want to listen to Muse at its best, this is the album you want to listen to. Every song is good, there are just two songs in the album which I don't think of as amazing, and even those are pretty damn good. My favourite of the album has to be, Sing For Absolution.
(http://www.videocodezone.com/videos/m/muse/sing_for_absolution.html - Sing For Absolution video)
Afterwards, loving Absolution, I began listening to the two other albums, which I loved as well. In between this whole listening of Muse, we went to (by we I mean my brother, a friend of his, and myself) New York City, where we stayed for about 4 days. My brother bought the Black Holes cd, which came with a video of the tour of Absolution in Glastonbury - absolutely amazing - it was then that I realized that these guys were incredible live. If I thought they were good on albums, live they were even better. We bought Absolution and Showbiz as well, while in NYC.

After having listened to them as much as I had, I was just about counting the hours of the days for them to end, waiting impatiently for August 3rd. Finally it came, so we left for NYC once again, meeting up with Mr. Fong (awesome Canadian friend of ours) and chillaxed for a bit, then headed down to the Ballroom (do not remember the name exactly.) The line to get inside was basicly the entire block of where the ballroom was, and we did not have actual seats, we were just in the general admittion area. Waiting outside we were slowly getting pissed thinking this place was going to be tiny and we were not going to be able to even see Muse playing, and almost decided to leave. Ruckiry, (or for un JPONRY people, luckily) we were about I'd say 5-6 feet away from the stage, so it was absolutely pimpin'. We waited about, I'd say, 20 minutes until The Cloud Room opened the stage, and in my opinion, they absolutely sucked. Maybe they just suck live, or maybe they really just suck in general. I have frankly, not taken the time to look them up, but now that I remembered them as I write this, I will. I promise, Henry, I'll look them up so you don't think I am simply judging them from one performance. Anyway, they played about 5 songs, and on the last one the singer said "All right, everyone this is our last song," and everyone cheered. The most cheering they got in the entire event, I'd say. So after they left, another 30 minutes waiting for Muse, until finally these two girls come out randomly and start talking about something but everyone's booing and saying get the frak off the stage until finally they say something...something...GIVE IT UP FOR MUSE! and everyone cheers, and BAM! Lights out. Everyone cheering, adrenaline pumping. Matt comes out, as well as the drummer and the bass player (got to find out the other two member's names...) and they begin with Take A Bow. The concert was crazy, we were all mushed together with everyone else, but, luckily for me, 4 out of the 5 people whom I was surrounded by were girls, and damn hot ones at that, so I didn't complain. Definately did not complain when we all started jumping, I didn't mind them jumping on top of me, it was rather enjoyable. It was definately true what they said about Muse being better live than they were on the album, but maybe it was just the energy and the loudness of the music in general that made me think that. I'd never been to a concert with a band that could go on stage and be worshipped and cheered on like Muse had done so. Again, I had never been in a mash pit crowd, other than at a HIM concert, but HIM could never even begin to be compared to Muse, both music-wise and energy-wise. They ended the concert with the song Knights of Cydonia, and it was pretty cool because on the stage they had long strips of white paper hanging in between tubes, its kind of hard to describe it, but they were like projection backs, and as Matt was singing the words "No one's gonna take me alive, time has come to make things right. You and I must fight for our rights, you and I must fight to survive," The words were projected on the screen, giving it an awesome, protest-like effect.
As we finally headed out of the Ballroom, through the 3 foot doors that were supposed to fit more than 2 thousand people, we were walking around the block to see where we could sit and chillax and have a final drink with Mr. Fong, who had to leave pretty much right after the concert. We found a place called Cafe MUSE. I got a mint box with the logo, which oddly enough looked a lot like the Muse logo, at least the part that said Muse. We took a picture of the entrance, too. Guess destiny wanted us to go there after the totally pimp concert. My brother and I then went back to Maryland, arriving home at 4 in the morning. I woke up to the song Hysteria playing in my room. Definately a nice way to wake up.

Other than that, the rest of my summer has been pretty normal, dull and ordinary. Been to the beach 4 times now, that was pretty fun.