The Veggies – Stick Around
You’ve heard the bad luck stories, I’m sure. How about all those kids who could have been incredible athletes but couldn’t afford the sneakers and the equipment to go train? How about all those potential great writers who couldn’t sit around reading books but had to work in a factory to support their families? Sadly, these tales are a dime a dozen.
Yeah, but what about the rock musicians? The really famous ones got discovered, were given a manager and were placed inside of a fancy studio with all sorts of well-dressed people pushing all sorts of buttons. But that can’t have been the thing that did it, right? Would the greatest songs in music history have never appeared were it not for throwing money at the musicians? That’s enough to plummet you into a depression, were it true.
Nah, they’d be recording them on cheap cassettes or chanting them in the park. The Veggies are here to prove, once more, that it ain’t who you know and how much money you’re able to afford on recording equipment. It’s all about your imagination and what you’re actively listening to. “Stick Around” is built on the great interplay between the two vocalists and on great melodies that have to have arrived from a great record collection. The fact that this is a lo-fi rock recording makes it all the more charming.
Celestial Skies – Desperation Nation
Just how much fun did you have the last time you went out on a scale of 1 to 10? And what else could you have been doing with all the time that you spent out on the town? You’d better start keeping a log. Boozy nights out tend to erase those memories.
If you do end up keeping some kind of record, the chances are that you’ll be surprised by what you find dotted down in your handwriting. All those nights of stupendous fun spent with friends who were just as inebriated as you are don’t seem to mean quite as much after they’re over.
Celestial Skies wonders what this kind of fun-chasing says about the people who can’t live without it? It’s an interesting question to be asked by a pop-rock band. After all, a good chunk of the work that a band does happens in bars and clubs.
“Desperation Nation” is a clever pop song about one of the last taboos in music. Are we really having fun every time that we go out to a show, consume our weight in liquor and promise ourselves that we’ll do it again next week? The lyrics of this are clever, and the melodies are catchy. But it’s the work with a topic that the entertainment industry would like to avoid that makes this quite special.
