So sorry for the long absence. A wedding, honeymoon, and preparing to move to Mongolia comes with a list of tasks that keeps my hands off the keyboard. The phrase that's been stuck in my head for the past week or so is, "there is never enough time." Though Kim and I are doing our best I know there will be loose ends here and, even worse, relationships we didn't get to invest in as much as wanted to before we left. It makes my heart heavy.

I'm sure there will be plenty of writing done on that in the future. In the mean time, here's a song that I have this weird mixture of pride and pure enjoyment in when I listen to it.

I've been blessed to have worked at New Noise with some of the most talented guys I've ever met, but at the same time I got to live with some amazing musicians as well. The four guys in Aushua lived in my house together for over a year - two in the house with me and two sharing a bunkbed in a dorm-style arranged garage. I first met Phil when I was at Concordia in 2002 and we sat next to each other in an English class. He answered a roommate ad I placed a few years later and lived with me for a year before his two brothers, Eric and Lee, and their friend Nate moved in.

I've gotten to watch them grow up as a band and as people over the past year especially as they went from a band that looked clumsy and awkward on stage to a band that is commanding and passionate. The easiest, and laziest, comparison you can make about Aushua is that they sound like a young U2 but from all of the VH1 Classic concerts they watched at the house I know they have influences ranging from Echo and the Bunnymen to Bruce Springsteen.

That's what makes a great band now that I think about it; they watch, they listen, they learn. I would come home from work and the four of them would be on the couch with some key bachelor recipe of frozen pizza or some kind of potato dish, attentively watching a classic concert of bands you have to be reminded of. Most bands mimic - like when you walk into a Guitar Center and you hear the endless sea of flubbed Zeppelin or Green Day riffs. Great bands pull pieces from their predecessors or peers and make them their own to the point that its their subtleties that make them truly great and Aushua has that. Their sense of melody in all of the instrumentation will be the first thing that you notice, but that just opens the door to you hearing the atmosphere and space that exists between the layers in their music. Because of their influences their music sounds familiar and new at the same time, but at the same time completely distinct. That distinction is what I'm proud of, the maturity; but thats probably just because I know them.

Anyway, I hope you love it as much as I do and that my small words might give you an appreciation for who they are as a band. Just press play on that little grey player at the top of this post.

You can visit them online at http://www.myspace.com/aushua

I'll write more soon.

There's just not enough time.

Nick

.