Tidewater Grain – 7 Headed And Full Of Life
Rock bands have pretty dumb reasons for being upset most of the time. They complain about loved ones treating them poorly, or their parents for not taking them to enough sporting events when they were children.
Those may be valid enough reasons to seek therapy, but rarely turn into convincing rock song lyrics. The standards are too high, and modern rock stars, perhaps, are just gliding through life too easily to concern themselves with being down long enough to pen a good song.
But, the fact is that in this music genre, a great number of great tunes have been created out of sheer frustration and the irreplaceable energy that this creates. Tidewater Grain managed to do that and blend with the kind of production values that massively help this kind of material in reaching its target audience.
Bitterness and distrust can be wonderfulyl potent ingredient when it comes to rock songwriting, especially in the world of post-grunge music. “7 Headed And Full Of Life” is a well-crafted and, especially, well produced song that feeds into your frustrations and get you shouting: “I’m not sure what they’re angry about, but I’m agry as well!” It’s a bit of a magic trick that alt-rock music has access to, and Tidewater Grain utilize it well.
a-tota-so – Death Rattle
It seems that the predictions were right. Things have to get really bad for the music to get really good. Maybe that’s why, for nearly a decade now, there were so few protest songs that they barely deserve to be mentioned.
Maybe, without us knowing it, things were just too good. I mean, sure, they weren’t enough to make anyone satisfied. However, certainly, from economic pressures to political and military threats, the situation didn’t make anyone sufficiently angry to complain.
However, now the air’s gotten thick. Everyone can feel themselves breathing a little less easily than they used to. And this newly uncovered pressure is something that everyone deals with differently. Math-rock grunge group a-tota-sa use this as fuel.
“Death Rattle” is a song about being pushed into a corner over and over again until trying to get out starts feeling like an impossibility. In that, the music echoes the similarly tense Seattle alt-rock of the early 1990s. Musically, a-tota-sa share some DNA with math-rock bands. However, and most importantly, this isn’t just a song about personal ordeals. It’s a soundtrack for an era.
