I remember when it all kind of crested last year, wondering what music would come out of this era. And here we are this season, the wave of the American situation, swelling on the production cycle, comes crashing. Albums by 00's darlings LCD, Arcade Fire, Liars, Thee Oh Sees, and now BSS, all slightly miserable. Onward and aware that this might be music no person not yet already born will ever hear.
And there's this unwillingness to smooth it all over. Here, in the form of this horrid piece of pacing, and endless parade of 4 minute songs, from a band that once let it breathe, this feels like an asthma attack. It feels like a band that thinks each song might be its last, dissonance overflowing every island.
They chug on. Shimmering guitars and this increasingly-fashionable unstoppable approach to post-motorik. There's nothing here that snaps me out, but maybe there's no out-snapping. A dirge even by the standards set before. Golden ages are over. We don't believe in god. We push on, because we must, but fun seems like an unaffordable luxury.
There's flashes of energy, but they feel like the thrashings of a drowning dog. The production itself an act of desperation, dancing in quicksand.
And yet, those horrid horns push us on, more lost than ever, they push us forward. Those chiming voices say "all right all right all right" and repeat what they feel, and crack and crash and hold you close in a sweat-drenched run in slow motion, repeating mantras, trying to convince themselves, too. And in the deep crannies lie wonderful details, little overlaps of vocals, little crackles of production, these cadences of half-smiled survival, small hopes fitting through gaps too small for sweeping gestures.
Yet another footnote for some hopeful future thesis about this era's immolating survival rock 4/5
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