
VIDA – Jump in Whole
There’s a kid right now in a bedroom somewhere that’s just created a barricade around the front door. Whenever that kid’s able to keep the mom and dad from entering by brute force, whenever they’re able to avoid doing homework, eating lunch or walking the dog, they’re listening to rock records and dreaming away to a sound that is a mixture of whatever albums have had the strongest impact.
If that’s your typical kid, filled with dreams as well as loneliness, chances are that they’re also dreaming of a way to put all of those sounds together someday. If that’s a typical kid, chances are that they’re working fingertips and brain cells in such a way as to create a sound that the parents won’t be able to understand, that they’ll beg to be played at a lower volume.
Some of those impassioned, nervous, ambitious kids formed VIDA. The main goal of the band, on “Jump in Whole,” at least, is to create music that sounds like the final death throes of a bar saloon fight. But nearly as important is to blend guitar-heavy sounds of classic rock, punk and hardcore into a mix that is, at the core, soft. The fort’s paid off, and so have all the hours spent listening to all of that rock music!
Stale – Day one
Sure, one of the great unanswered questions is the familiar one about bad things happening to good people. But, maybe just as important to ask is why good people want terrible things to happen to them and in what doses. Ask yourself that the next time you see someone in a sharp suit, sit up at a bar and order whiskey shots until they nearly black out.
You might, of course, have to ask yourself first what you’re doing at the same bar, and it’s a weekday. But once you come to some sort of answer, you may well understand yourself better. You’ll know why you dream of speeding trains racing toward you, why you take unnecessary risks that your friends would avoid, and why the sounds that soothe you are constructed using colossal guitar and drum tones.
Stale bring the sharpest edges of grunge and nu-metal to “Day One” and creates the kind of song that feels like a nautical disaster caught on tape. But, if you are like this writer, the music will feel greatly comforting. Here’s something that very much sounds like the forces of nature being unleashed that you can, in fact, control the start and end off. Stale, meanwhile, bloody the waters and leaves no survivors. Why does it all feel so right?