Anguid – Man of Action
There’s certainly a lot of music, some of it good, most of it not, written about someone’s hometown and about the feeling of belonging. It certainly makes one’s eyes well up when thinking about the places from which they are from. However, these feelings also usually encourage people to write daft tunes about the flag, beer and naked girls dancing. Kid Rock has the corner of the market pretty much covered.
There’s a different, albeit less popular approach and that’s to write songs about not fitting in, being out of your element, feeling like you’re a million miles from home. Man of action is that kind of song, a veritable Space Oddity, in which instead of the vastness of space, the title character sounds as if he’s lost in some hotel room outside a city that is not his own.
There’s a languid feeling about the song. Much like bands like War on Drugs, this feels like music intended for difficult mornings where the world will just not stop spinning. The production also emphasizes elements that should make this play easily over the radio, like an 80s road-ballad. Anguid’s is a good tune, the kind that could accompany you through the end of the week where the uncertainties in your mind start ringing louder.
Alabama Deathwalk – Limits
You may argue that the youth of today has a habit of overreacting to hardships. Some of that criticism is founded. After all, 2020 was hardly the worst year in human history. Working like a slave, if you’re lucky to have been born in a Western country, is a gross exaggeration. And, “going from 110 to 0%” as Alabama Deathwalk puts it sounds a bit like someone finally losing faith in the self-help industry.
With that being said, great songs are hardly ever written about the normal or the mundane. The artistic spirit, in general, is depicted in art as being one prone to extravagant behaviour, bouts of joy and melancholy, a tendency to look for poetry in everyday events.
By that token, Alabama Deathwalk certainly exhibit that artistic spirit on their ode to spiritual exhaustion, Limits. The vocals gently detail the loss of power and focus over an expensive-sounding production that mixes reverb-soaked acoustic guitars with electronic elements. It sounds like someone singing alone in a very large room which is, essentially, the sound of modern folk in a nutshell. With this song, Alabama Deathwalk captures the spirit of modern indie-folk.
