Billy Peake is now the artist who will make you look differently at the person parked next to you, that you see daily, driving their kids in an SUV to football practice. It’ll make you ask: “What kind of stories might they be hiding?” or “What secret plan might they be working on in their basement after they’ve put the kids to sleep?”
These kinds of suspicions can be a wonderful thing. Listen, there used to be a time when there was not enough available music so that musicians could realistically fancy their chances of getting their records available to the public. Now, there’s simply too much music available for you, or any other musical obsessive, to be aware of all the great daily, digital releases.
Billy Peake’s professionally sounding lo-fi, moody alt-rock collected on “Manic Waves” should just make you hopeful enough to regularly go out searching for a musical treasure. You might need to order it, have someone recommend it (ahem!), or luckily stumble on to it. But, then again, isn’t this how independent music has always worked?
What, exactly, are the stories that Peake has been hiding while learning to be a responsible adult? Judging by the album opener, “Go Back to Where You Came From,” it’s strife, tension, and a kind of cartoonish violence that occupies Peake’s dreams.
The musical result is, nearly always, however, melancholy-filled, but pleasant-sounding. “Annie You’re a Lightning Bolt” is a lovely feminist anthem, complete with roaring bass guitar riffs. And “Maybe We Shouldn’t! Takes a disjoined, distorted guitar riff and somehow shapes it into something of a dance-rock track.
Still, there’s more than just experience and professionalism that colour this collection of songs. Billy Peake isn’t just informed by the sound of 90s alternative-rock, but by the worldview of the era’s most important bands. What do wisecracking cynics develop into?
On the ‘90s Beck-like “Grandad Was a Demon,” Peake’s gallows humour shines through as he dreams of a land filled with white collar criminals and violent miscreants, only to discover he’s essentially described the fate’s most favoured modern nation. And on the hushed, acoustic-led “Age of Dumb,” Peake faces the reality that the Cobain-led Revolution never had any hope.
Where does this leave us? Playing our part in the case of Billy Peake. “Manic Waves” is a strong, enjoyable record and, frankly, not a collection of songs that you would’ve been lucky to find in recorded form only a few decades ago. Responsible parents are making impassioned rock n’ roll, and I’d like to think that the world’s a little bit better for it.
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