Quaking Aspens – Flume
The spells are no longer being used, or there are too few who know how they go. Most of modern entertainment is either too short, demanding that you pay for additional tickets to endless sequels, or needlessly long, taking three hours before you’re told that the killer was the main character all along. But it didn’t used to be this way.
For the most part, audience members just needed a place in which they could get lost. Quaking Aspens are one of the few groups still supplying this kind of respite, but we’re entering a crisis now. Faced with having to face the real world, there’s no telling what regular people are likely to do. There’s only so much reality one person can take, and only so many epics about battling dragons that one has the time to watch.
The greatest quality of Quaking Aspens is the way that the group stubbornly takes its time. If you’re jittery or have an appointment planned, you need not stand in line. “Flume” is people who want to spend the whole day, who need to be sucked down into the underworld for a while, who want to avoid their friends and parents. The vocals blend in a kind of mesmeric quiver, and instruments purr. Before you know it, you don’t know where you are anymore. That’s what we wanted all along! Someone’s still got access to the spell book!
Honey Daze – Another Habit To Break
It usually only takes a few idiots to spoil everything for thousands of well-intended people. That’s how revolutions of all types work. And that’s why it’s routine for the enemies of these movements to send in knuckleheads dressed up in the enemy’s uniform and have them create havoc. There’s no real way of escaping this, I’m afraid, though, not, at least, as long as you want the revolution to include everyone.
Honey Daze are bringing post-hardcore, nu-metal-adjacent music, so popular in the 2000s, back to its emotional roots. While this type of music had at its core a focus on raw emotion, strategies for dealing with trauma, and, well, vulnerability, this is not what the layman will remember it for. They’ll remember frat boys with backwards turned baseball caps looking to beat the hell out of each other.
Honey Daze’s “Another Habit To Break” is a lush-sounding, heavy rock song about getting yourself into horrible trouble and learning to wriggle your way out of it like some kind of famous magician. This is a modern rock song, sure, but also the dream of groups like Deftones of mixing the sweetness of shoegaze with the attack of hardcore.
Pay close attention to the melodies and the production. Honey Daze creates a kind of warmth that is designed to make you uncomfortable. The music gives the feeling of someone purposely sealing the windows in a little room shut. It takes a lot of effort and a good deal of perceptivity to write this kind of music.
