Reverends – Are You Weeping Still?
People decry the state of the music business. But, as far as I see it, there are a lot of bands earning too much money for too little work. I see them every time they’re in town, and I’m immediately baffled by how efficiently they dispose of a paying audience.
The roll in, get their people to set up the gear, show up one hour late and proceed to play the same songs they play every night. If you manage to get a good look at their faces through the spotlight, you’ll notice that they’re thinking about what they’re going to have for dinner.
That’s the reason why, to my mind, bands like Reverends deserve, at the very least, your appreciation. They give you bang for the buck. In fact, they’re one of the few groups of musicians who don’t sound like they’ve got anywhere else that they want to be.
“Are You Weeping Still?” is a 5-minute single that feels like it goes on for hours, like an ancient mantra on a feedback loop. Hear the singer deliver those words about isolation and longing, and take comfort in the fact that there’s absolutely no rush! The goal is to make you, should you decide you want it, part of the very essence of that isolation. Reverends make gloomy, but inviting psych-rock.
lesser birds – Feed the Fire, Pt. 2
Pop stars are in a hurry. Boy, I wouldn’t want to be them. They’re always having to run from one place to another. They probably get up at dawn for rehearsals, hit the gym in the afternoon, and have to be ready for the talk shows by the evening. And that’s if they don’t have any shows or recordings booked.
Not even farmers in villages without electricity are forced to work that hard. And that is why I think, why pop stars are also in a hurry when you finally hear their songs. They are told that brevity sits at the heart of good commerce.
Pop stars need to deliver a story in three minutes. But, most importantly, they need to end the story, need to tell you how things settled, and must reassure you that there was a happy ending. Fortunately, lesser birds don’t live or create under these constraints.
In fact, there’s something about lesser birds’ “Feed the Fire, Pt. 2,” that purposely feels like a story involving great drama where the final chapters have been ripped out. You start reading back, again and again, and you always find yourself at the same crossroads. lesser birds achieve this through great use of a tense, mysterious alt-rock arrangement and by using a vocal tone that suggests that the singer knows more about this story than they are letting on.
