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Infatuation, Love, and All That Follows

These United States' "First Sight" begins unassumingly, with a minimalist approach that offers few hints of the verbal flood to follow: a bevy of images, all delivered with the same gentle intensity. These small melodic bits pull and push the listener's attention, moving continuously under layered melodies and a wash of words.

A story floats on top of them, never devolving into narration but immediately standing out with surprising turns of phrase: "With her mouth making movements to introduce thoughts, I sat. Deafened by trust on the sofa across, quietly calculating the logistics of lust — of when unspoken things could then happen between us."

The melody continues to move, neither sitting stagnantly in the background nor overwhelming the riptides of ideas. It's easy, then, to follow the song's progression of instant passion to love, all the way to the point where "generations would follow the course that we'd charted. From that sofa across, I couldn't wait to get started."

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Claire Blaustein
Claire Blaustein is a freelance writer and music critic who writes for a variety of publications, including The Washington Post, Exclaim! Magazine and La Scena Musicale. She came to NPR as a Performance Today intern in 2005, and has thus far refused to leave. When not doing any of the above, she writes in her blog, I Dig Music..., and pouts until someone gives her a new CD to play with.
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