Don’t say this loudly, but whisper to your closest friends instead, but maybe it’s time to get ready to get happy. If you think you might happen to forget and start shouting it at the top of your voice, make sure that you’re wearing running shoes and have mapped out an escape route that leads back to your home.
The fact is that the vast majority of people, especially those putting their thoughts down in songs and other types of art form, are convinced that the gloom that has set upon us will never lift. These feelings have been exacerbated recently by living in the grand U.S. of A., once the home of songs about endless Summers spent on the beach and cars that run on the highway like spaceships.
But the bad times can’t last forever. It’s time to make plans for what happens once hope rolls back into town. In many ways, James Beastly’s recent album, “We Should Be Animals,” is a collection of songs written on the final days of Babylon, just as architects have started measuring the place in order to tear it down and put up a theme park instead.
Just listen to the opening track, the driving sound of “Spring Violets”, and soak some of those chord changes in. Beastly sings endless days and dark clouds rolling away. But it’s a song still written during times of trouble, with the chord progressions making you feel ambivalent about exactly why way things are likely to go.
You’re not the only one hanging on to uncertainties and burying them deep in your heart. “Fear of Joy” with the soaring violin lines rising over the sparse acoustic backing is an opposite-haunting story, one in which the woman of the songwriter’s dreams ends up chasing all of the demons outside of the old house.
Musically, the record is dominated by the singer’s resonant, Bowiesque baritone vocals placed at the top of nicely designed mixes where guitars shimmer and propel up hook after musical hook. To my ears, essentially, “We Should Be Animals” feels like a singer-songwriter album given plenty of modern pop spark and taking generous inspiration from alt-rock auteurs.
But, you get the feeling that the man who goes by the moniker of James Beastly when venturing out into the world of music, isn’t looking for hero worship, but playing his part. The acoustic guitar-driven title track dares to grin when faced with the modern world’s worst aspects, the retro-psych-tinged “Consolation Prize” provide words of encouragement as a recipe for emotional upheavals, and the moody alt-rocker “The Defeatist” turns against those who see the ugliness in all things beautiful.
Where does it leave us? Getting ready for Spring and for better days, hopefully. The closing number, “Oh! Mockingbird”, sets everything right back to the way that it once was. The world’s a mess sometimes, but nothing lasts forever, not even the bad times.
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