Hevvy Serve – Anhedonia
Yes, there are still plenty of bands and musical artists dreaming of turning pro. But apart from practising taking interviews while they’re showering, and investigating what sounds are trending that week, what’s the first thing that they invest in?
A bunch of expensive clothes and someone who can do your makeup in a makeshift club bathroom nearly always seems to be the way to go. And while, just like catholicism, you don’t have much of a rock scene without some extravagant clothing, you get the feeling that many artists are putting the cart in front of the horse.
There are a lot of mediocre bands in your home town playing every weekend, and most of them, dammit, look fantastic. But there’s nothing else to help tell them apart, which is quite the opposite of Hevvy Serve’s strategy for the group’s most recent single.
Hevvy Serve’s “Anhedonia” is a lo-fi grunge alt-rocker about being offered all the pleasures of the world and not being able to feel them. And if this kind of emotion, or lack thereof, needs to be acted out, Hevvy Serve’s performance does this very well. It’s a recording that feels like it was made on an old cassette player of someone having a great crisis of confidence. It’s quite good, helps Hevy Serve stand out, and I bet whoever sings this wasn’t even wearing a trendy shirt or makeup while recording this!
The City Gates – La douleur (des mortels)
It’s quite rare, I’d imagine, to be sitting in a quiet cafe and hear someone’s phone ringing out to the melody of “Gloomy Sunday.” And it’s just as unusual to be out on a first date, ask the person you’re seeing what they’re favourite music is and be told that, actually, they really have a fascination with songs written during either one of the two World Wars.
For the most part, we are told, pop music is a tool to help us forget about the most terrible things in the world and help us remember the good times. Because of that, rock fans (and I use the terms as wide-reachingly as I can) are not necessarily smarter than all other fans, but, at the very least, care. Rock music is one of the few forms of mass public entertainment that often includes themes regarding war, fear, and suffering as lyrical themes worth exploring, after all.
And that’s why, in this world that we hope we’ll make perfect, but have yet failed to do so, The City Gates’ “La douleur (des mortels)” works almost like protest music. The moody, goth-tinged song works with tragedy and suffering in the same way that a Sabrina Carpenter song works with themes related to sex and success. Most importantly, and oddly, The City Gates’ music scratches an itch of looking at the world around us as it is, getting awfully upset about it and, at least, telling the truth about it.
