Rainer Maria

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song to break. Not even finding out the song was called "The Awful Truth of Loving" cured me of needing to hear it again. It was a Rainer Maria song from Long Knives Drawn, a ferocious album about love as a battle both between the lovers and between a couple and the rest of the world.

Rainer Maria is named after the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, but it's hard to hold that against this band once you hear its music. Now that I have, I think the name is just right. Long Knives Drawn and its new album, Catastrophe Keeps Us Together, tap the same yearning as Rilke's Duino Elegies and Letters to a Young Poet: the desire to swoon; to embrace deep emotion, good or bad; to feel the tug of some epic force in the sky.

"Baby, there's the moon/I'll sing it down if you ask me to," vocalist Caithlin De Marrais sings a cappella to start the song "Bottle." A soft, sharp electric guitar accompanies her next two lines, and then bang! the drums slam in and tough guitar chords drown her vocals. Rilke, who hoped terrifying angels would hear his cries, would approve.