PUSCH – Arms Length
If you’re a particularly picky artist, it’s realistic that you might spend several years, maybe your entire lifetime, completing a single song. Why not? There are so many decisions to make and so many tools with which to make them nowadays. Even the greatest composers and producers would struggle to explain one of their decisions over the other. It’s easy to get overly ambitious.
It’s also not hard to get dispirited, especially if you’re looking to make heavy music. Not much sounds genuinely heavy nowadays, and very little sounds terrifying. Of course, musicians from Northern Europe have to brag about burning churches and sacrificing cats. Heavy music has never been easier to enjoy by your grandma and her friends.
Knowing how easy it is to get lost in this kind of situation, PUSCH takes a direct punch and gets ready to deal with the consequences once they arrive. “Arms Length” is short, to the point and sounds like being ambushed in a dead-end alley. There’s genuine anger in the singer’s voice. And in a year in which you might’ve promised to do better for yourself, it might just be time to listen to tales of one-sided friendships told by the lyrics.
Idaho Green – Robotrippin at the Gates of Hell
Nature had a way of motivating people capable of achieving great things. Back in the olden days, it forced them to make a choice. It was a choice between greatness and starving to death, getting your head chopped off by invading avars, or dying at 20 years old from some disease that nowadays can be treated by a pill that you get at your local pharmacy.
The great generals of old are now trying to make a career for themselves in e-sports, the great philosophers are admins on Reddit, and the great composers ain’t got time to learn more than a few power chords. Why bother with anything else? And why seek the great ones in governments, law houses or hospitals? They’re still out there getting things done. They’re just not getting paid for it.
Idaho Green makes a great, chaotic punk sound. Add one more chord to this arrangement, and you’d ruin it. And although “Robotrippin at the Gates of Hell” sounds like the work of kids who’ve saved enough money for guitars, a speed habit and some recording software, things go deeper than that.
“Robotrippin at the Gates of Hell” is an existentialist anthem inspired by video games refusing to allocate the proper resources to the songwriter’s avatar. Virtual reality, it seems, is just as unforgiving as the kind of reality where if you hit your toenail on the door, you go, “Ouch!” Things might be racing toward their end, but Idaho Green is determined to go kicking and screaming every step of the way.
