Hey, Hey, I've Got It: Air Miami

Again GBoAT brings you the regular honor of miss M. Meltzer. ENJOY, as per usual.

I would really like to write about Unrest, but my feelings about that band are too breathless and hysterical and upbeat to really put into words. And besides, I've spent the last several weeks in the Catskills doing not much else but watching deer eat apples in the yard, reading, and renewing my love for Air Miami. It all started when I decided a new landscape deserved a new jogging soundtrack. (Jogging to, like, Ludacris in upstate New York didn't feel right, you know?) I wish I could say I was one of those people who could just run, breeze through hair, just the music of nature, or whatever, but I am so not. Instead I just start to wonder why Adidas can make such perfect shoes for all manner of sports and yet their running shoes are just so not hot. I needed to focus and space out at the same time. I needed Air Miami.

At the end of the winter of 1994, Unrest met its untimely demise, a fact that still makes me sad, over a decade later. Fortunately, Mark Robinson and Bridget Cross, both of Unrest, decided their rather prodigious talents should not be wasted. In the spring of 1994 they formed Air Miami with Lauren Feldsher and Mike Fellows. They were sort of like Unrest--the same lush voices and chimey guitarbut slightly more new wave.

Their sole album (a double album, actually, released on Robinson's label Teenbeat and on 4AD in Europe in Japan), Me Me Me, contains the amazingly catchy "I Hate Milk" with the weirdly peppy chorus of "Please please, someone kill me soon." Also on the album is "World Cup Fever" an ode commemorating the World Cup's somewhat overlooked appearance in the US in 1994. How much do I love a band willing to sing about soccer? Um, a lot. These days I'm really obsessed with the Fuck You, Tiger EP. "See-Through Plastic" is a love song in need of a mix tape. I swear they recorded the rolling, lapping sounds of waves and put that on the song. That, or I'm missing California a little too much. "Warm Miami May" is a song so sunny its almost haunting, almost as if it's a sung from a grave. I've been listening to it on repeat.

I read somewhere that there's some kind of cherry grown in Michigan, or maybe it was Wisconsin, that is only available for a week or two every year, in the summer. And of course it's, like, the greatest cherry of all time. Not to get overly sentimental, but I guess I sort of think of Air Miami similarly. A band for only six months, they had such a fleeting existence, but they left us with a handful of perfect songs. Mark Robinson would go on to work his magic in Flin Flon, and Bridget Cross would do her solo albums, but Air Miami was so much more than a brief post-Unrest new wave moment, they were the Greatest Band of All Time.