Brightest Young Things

Exit Clov have been a band for 6.5 years now. They've headlined the Black Cat, played every other venue in town, released a handful of EPs and definitely got a serious amount of press and buzz. They've done all that but they've not released a full length. Until now. Now armed with a new record "Memento Mori", 2 CD release shows this weekend and a new "nervous people collective" website, and a myriad of side projects they're set to conquer what's left of the DC music world.
Here, Emily and Susan walk us through 4 of the 11 songs on their debut LP:

Blue is Your Heart | This song was the first time we found a way to incorporate the melodica on a recording. We were going for something a little Afro-beaty, with organic, earthy instrumentation and choir-like vocals. We even thought about having a group of choir boys sing it :) Lyrically, it's a post-epiphany song about how big, bad and beautiful our earth is. We do so much to it, both good and bad, and at the end of our lives, we all go right back into the earth. It's like whatever we've done she takes us back in and gives us a place to rest our weary bones or ashes. Indeed, there is a tiny bed of earth waiting for each one of us, with a stone to remember our names.

Ritchie Valens | Ritchie Valens is about living your life without regret and accepting, though not necessarily being resigned to, the fact that life is fleeting, along with the many things in it -- losses that cause people to suffer unimaginably. It's about recognizing this reality, but still finding a way love and live in the midst of suffering and being ready to let go, of everything, because at any moment you just might have to. It's a learning process to not live safely but to love or what you will, and to love now because in the end, "everything becomes, then goes."

Death is a Song | This song is a tribute to our father, who he was and what he gave us. We wrote a big part of the lyrics on headphones while sitting in a hospital room just weeks before our father passed in May 2007. At the time, there was an African woman who worked in the hospital parking garage, and she'd seen us come into the hospital every day for several weeks. We were surprised one day when she asked about our dad. She told us to take heart, that God is the healer, and to leave everything to him. It was strange, she was such a residual character in the whole experience, not a doctor or nurse or surgeon ... but still those few words from an ordinary bystander had such an enormous, comforting impact on us.

Free Zone | This song started out as a stripped-down piano composition by Aaron and evolved as we wrote the rest of it together in the studio. As just a piano piece, it sounded really bleak but was also really beautiful, and it seemed to work well as a good prison song - prison being a psychological or emotional state of mind. It could very well be just the prison of a daily routine where you're totally uninspired and unenthused. So the lyrics are a little surreal - they're about a person who spends her time mindlessly "building widgets and concrete." There's suffocation and paranoia, panic attacks that your life is of little consequence, and a strange notion that you're paying this bottomless debt to an unknown collector. The clincher at the end of the song is that we're actually the ones building our own concrete walls, and so there is a way out! You just have to walk away from the wet cement and tools and stop building the walls.

Want more:
Visit them at exitclov.comor follow them on twitter and check out their 2 CD release shows this weekend: TONIGHT @ Strathmore (with True Womanhood) and TOMORROW @ Iota (with Olivia Mancini & The Mates and Poor But Sexy)