Arts Fishing Club – Feed Me to the Wolves
Are you looking for honesty from your hard-earned rock n’ roll? You’re unlikely to find much of that, although the indie-folk group Arts Fishing Club is a notable exception to the rule that states that rock songs that you hear on the radio ought to make you forget about your problems, make you forget where you are, and make you believe that the good times are going to come along and last forever.
Are you looking for gentleness from your pop-rock that you so eagerly tune in to hear? There’s no reason to assume that you’re going to get much of a loving touch either, although, once again, Arts Fishing Club stand as an outlier. Most pop songs are like holiday shopping slogans written in big neon letters. They’re hard to miss and difficult to misinterpret.
Arts Fishing Club’s “Feed Me to the Wolves” is, first and foremost, a special performance captured on tape, one where a soft touch, whispered words and the acknowledgement that life can get pretty tough are all included. It’s a song about how one bad choice, usually, leads to a million others. That’s hardly the message that you’ll get from a 1980s pop-metal song, but, then again, most of the people who sang those sorts of songs are either dead or tremendously fat and untalented. Arts Fishing Club and their fans face those cruel realities and may just escape intact.
Heavy Petrol – Troublemaker
Is the blues alive, or can we simply send in our respects every once in a while and not worry too much about it the rest of the time? And, if it is alive, what’s keeping it breathing after such a long time and after suffering the indignity of turning into the musical style that every drunk dad tries to jam on?
I’d like to imagine that it’s the suffering that’s kept fresh and serves as fertile ground for this style of music. Maybe it was because the original blues artists simply didn’t know any better, or perhaps it was a consequence of being just a little too honest, but the great songs in this style are sometimes fun and always heartbreaking.
What’s there left to do? Get out there and get some hurt! Maybe Heavy Petrol’s “Troublemaker” is merely meant to be fun, and some of the Luxembourg band’s lyrics end up sounding this way simply because it’s taken effort to transform them into English. But, look for a second besides the fun boogie and blues riffs and Billy Gibbons-like growl, and you’ll hear confessions about a life lived in fear and neglect that ought to land someone in jail. Is Heavy Petrol just trying to be funny? Hopefully, not, because this kind of storytelling is too good to merely be a joke.
