full catholic – Courage
What does a rock band have to do to earn an audience nowadays? For the most part, it needs to keep audiences comfortable and not stick out. Rock music, usually, is a soundtrack to cocktail soirees and business parties.
It’s, indeed, rare to still find artists who are both desperate to communicate with an audience and willing to take the risk of scaring listeners. It’s uncommon to find pop-rock artists willing to take great risks and convinced of their mission to stand out.
There are bands like full catholic who’d like you to consider why certain sounds and ideas make you feel uncomfortable. But, for the most part, rock bands just want you to feel at ease for long enough to buy another T-shirt and drink.
full catholic’s “Courage” is a song about coming to terms with the most uncomfortable aspects of the human condition. Fittingly, the way that the tune is sung is meant to bring to mind struggles, difficulties and, ultimately, grace. full catholic takes great chances on “Courage” and they all pay off.
Half Naked Houseplants – Power Cuts
They say that you can just about tell what the mood of the times is by looking at what artists are talking about through their works. Your best bet to get a pulse of the times, of course, is to glance at pop culture. Are we getting disaster movies? Are all the hit songs written from the perspective of a jilted lover?
It shouldn’t require a great deal of analysis to notice that a great deal of those stories and songs, in the last couple of years, have been about AI and the overabundance and overreliance of technology.
But while most rock stars write from the perspective of someone who is afraid that they’ll get replaced and thrown out on the scrap heap, Half Naked Houseplants cleverly look at how it all started and what part of our human frailties inevitably brought us to this point.
Ironically, there’s a great warmth to the sound of the single “Power Cuts.” The song itself is a love story between a human and a machine. Only that, in this tale, the human is too enraptured to figure out that they’ve been staring into a mirror the whole time, falling in love with themselves until someone pulls the plug. It’s a compelling song, an entertaining song, and it just makes you wonder if we aren’t hard-wired all along to bring about our own destruction.
