Alone at Parties – Self-Help Books
If historical documents like “Back to the Future” are to be believed, the world used to be a place that was much easier to understand. Seems like one could easily get by on a smile, a good haircut, and an ace leather jacket. Learn to play “Johnny B. Goode” while dangling the guitar above your head, and you’ve made it. All of these things coalesced into an exciting, yet comfortable existence.
But even being in a band won’t save you from talking about self-improvement, late-night thoughts about whether you missed some great opportunities along the way, and that nagging feeling that you could do a little bit better. Alone at Parties know that would-be rockstars are the first in the doors of the shrink offices. But who do you ask for advice, and who can you trust? And do things really need to get better?
It’s a neat, post-coffee-buzz sound that Alone at Parties produce, and weighty themes that are on the songwriter’s mind. On “Self-Help Books,” the ever-anxious musicians take aim at the gurus, banking on our insecurities and feeding us 200-page lectures on how to optimise our lives for maximum efficiency. The sound of the track eventually, beautifully veers off the tracks just in the way that our meagre existences do once every trace of imperfection has been erased. Alone at Parties are brainy post-punks with library cards and caffeine addictions. Who would dare try to trim that?
Alpha Pet – Mall of Death
How much tragedy do we really need in our lives? Clearly, we need to negotiate some kind of balance. Of course, you would feel cheated by fate were you to live in impoverished, war-torn parts of the world, of which there are so many.
But, just as well, you’ll feel like you’re missing something if all that you get is comfort and convenience. Finding your identity as an inhabitant of one of the most developed parts of the world isn’t all that rosy either.
You might not lose your life driving yourself to the shopping malls of Scandinavia, but you lose a bit of your soul each time that you visit down there, as Alpha Pet signals. This ain’t a place for those looking to live out great adventures, or create the kind of memories that in their older years they’ll be thankful to remember once in a while.
Alpha Pet’s “Mall of Death” is a wonderfully cheeky anti-consumerism anthem straight from one of the places most hit with this affliction, Sweden. The choices involved in making the instrumental, or delivering that theatrical singing style, are also fascinating, bringing to mind 1980s David Bowie. It’s a strong sound, and a song worth crying about if, once again, Black Friday has robbed you of most of your energy and financial resources.
