The Active Set – Death Of A Friend
Existentialist philosophy is making a comeback, and your social media apps may have been playing a part in the Kierkegaardian revival. Maybe it’s because it used to be that bad news simply reached people at a slower pace. Well, that’s a luxury few of us can enjoy nowadays. The Active Set know this all too well.
People become rock stars or move to deserted islands in the hopes that they’ll avoid reality for longer than their peers. Those are all solid plans. But bad news travels fast nowadays, and they even got Wi-Fi in the Peruvian jungle.
You’ll get a text or notification the next time that a famous musician or the Queen of England dies. You’ll, only naturally, click on it. And you’ll begin sharing in everyone else’s grief. Finally, you’ll inevitably start thinking about all the other people that you personally are closer to than rock stars and royalty.
The next step is denial or depression. And that’s precisely where The Active Set find themselves on “Death of a Friend.” The chorus implores divinity to stop people from dying for a second just so that the storyteller here can recollect themselves. But it’s no use. It’s all terribly depressing and kind of funny in the inevitability of it all. And while The Active Set make clever, tense indie-rock music, surely they also know that life’s worth using even when those notifications start coming in thick and fast.
Between Days – Amber Eyes
One can’t help but get the feeling that the studio environment of old must’ve really killed off a lot of the world’s greatest records. We’ll never get to hear some of those albums, I reckon, simply because it cost too much to make some of them, while in other cases, there were simply too many people working around a professional studio to get the very best out of eccentric, but talented artists.
Thankfully, bands like Between Days, and others of their modern contemporaries can absorb all of the darkly poetic band discographies that they want right out of their computer and can use the same device to record their own versions. This is the reason, perhaps, why we are spoiled for choice when it comes to fantastic, shadowy music inspired by 1980s goth, post-punk and pop.
“Amber Eyes” by Between Days may sound as if it’s quoting musical elements from the great list of 1980s goth pop stars. However, in reality, it’s reinventing the music genre by painting it from memory. This is what we all assume the music of that decade sounded like before we actually go back and listen to it. Instead, Between Days use modern techniques to create its lush, darkly atmospheric sound. The group very cleverly leaves out space in their recordings, allows the music to breathe, and, in this way, creates an all-purpose soundtrack for all dusk-related activities.
