Socially Suspect – P.S.
What would you be doing in a perfect world? If you’d just continue with some of the same activities that you’re involved with now, while simply eliminating the financial implications, you might have already chosen the right route for yourself.
But what should we call this world? Can we go with “Heaven”? That’d make it easier to picture. Think about a place where you can do what you like forever. You might even be able to play music with your friends as often and as long as you want. That sounds like something that the musicians who make up Socially Suspect might enjoy.
But what about songs? Surely, not even Heaven’s residents can stand meandering jam sessions for too long. But what to write songs about when everything is perfect? Not even Heaven’s residents can stomach tunes about a perfect world without being bored out of their wits.
Forget Heaven for a moment. There’s plenty to work on down here, and plenty of people intent on making that work harder. At least, all this stress and disappointment encourage creativity in some. Socially Suspect’s simple, direct alt-rock of “P.S.” is a song about terrible bosses trying to get under the skin and inside the minds of their employees. If Heaven exists, they won’t make the journey, surely. But, until then, they can slowly burn in the fire of songs like “P.S.”
Stuart Fork – Silver Lux Holiday
Few people have the luxury of being alone nowadays. And the ones that do have forgotten to turn off notifications on their phone and keep reading about the result in the elections or what their favourite team did last weekend.
For the most part, you’d need to be either a really wealthy person or some sort of Howard Hughes-type in order to get a bit of solitude for yourself. Kevin Castillo of Stuart Fork is the rare exception, a musician who has made it an objective to seek that silence out.
But it ain’t going to be easy. It’s not just the fact that you’re likely to get car horns ringing in your ears from on top of the mountains, and plastic sticking to your leg when deep inside the lagoons. What are you going to think about when you’re all by yourself?
Loneliness ain’t scaring Castillo. “Silver Lux Holiday” is a fuzz-drenched indie-rock song written about and in the midst of solitude. But this isn’t music for the kinds of people who’ve given up on society just yet and dream of taking their revenge. This is all a fantasy. It’s music about finding freedom within yourself and outside the reach of everyone else.
