With perfect 2020 hindsight - one album stands above all others released this year.
February feels like it was a different time altogether. There were gigs, tours, good times - with a whole year of gigs, tours and good times to come.
Since then, there’ve been online show live-streams, stripped back albums that probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day if not for lockdown and it feels relentlessly like there’s no end in sight.
In between, there’s been a lot of stunning music – much of it matching the mood.
Spanish Love Songs’ Brave Faces, Everyone was fired out into the world a little more than a month into the year and immediately provided a searing punk rock companion for our times.
The Pure Noise Records album felt like a clarion call. As a commentary on the state of it all up to that point in time, it was damn near perfect. We’re in this shitty world together, so brave faces everyone.
As we chaotically stumble towards 2020’s finishing line on our last legs, Spanish Love Songs’ third album has proved it couldn’t have been more prescient if it tried. Listening to it now with the benefit of a full year - this year - behind it is quite the experience.
It would be hard not to quote line after line from the album’s 10 songs as proof.
Every track hits hard, lyrics anchored in pain, angst, a loss of hope. It’s bleak stuff and even if there’s almost always a glint of hope amidst it all, it sounds tired, sceptical, jaded. The addition of a comma and a pause in the album’s title track makes the notion of putting a brave face on sound less like a call to arms and more resigned to this all just being overwhelmingly difficult: “We don’t have to fix everything at once, we were never broken, life’s just very long, brave faces, everyone.”
It was already going to be a big album for LA-based SLS, following on from 2018’s landmark Schmaltz. Still punky, still melodic, still laden with anguish and emotion, the distinctive vibrato vocals of Dylan Slocum rip through every song, even – maybe especially - during quieter moments. The lyrics and their delivery are downright inspiringly-clever.
The production is bigger than on Schmaltz. Polish has been applied. Everything is louder, deeper. The bass lines thunder through these tracks and the drums couldn’t be tighter. The guitar work is heavier but at the same time more intricate. The whole thing is laced with threads of subtle synths. A standout track, Beachfront Property – driven by a beautiful bass hook - does the job as well as any other: “Said, it’s the end of days, and we’re still hoping for the beachfront property….”
The way everything comes together makes this album special. Even with the polished edges, the lyrics, vocal and music retain their sharpness.
Optimism (As a Radical Life Choice) is a perfect articulation of how it works. Starting acoustically, a low-key lyric is bursts into one of the heaviest moves SLS have made so far. Lyrics – whether voiced at top volume or in the song’s quiet ending – are searing: “Don’t take me out back and shoot me, I know my circuits are faulty, now I’ve only ever been a kid, pointing out dead dogs on the road / Take me down in a landslide, help me weather this high tide, I’ll wear you out waiting for me to implode”.
It was an eagerly-awaited album by many who had Schmaltz on a loop (and still do) – the anthemic Losers was on my most listened to tracks of 2019 list despite being a late-in-the-year release – and it has only improved as the year lurched on.
The chance to see these songs live came in February, just a week after the album came out and shortly before gigs stopped. Billed with The Menzingers, SLS took the roof off Glasgow’s QMU with a set featuring a handful of new material. Having first caught them at Bannerman’s in Edinburgh just 18 months before that on their first UK visit, then in Birmingham and Manchester since, it’s been a buzz getting on the first wave of a band making it out there and going with it.
With 2021 just round the corner, who knows what SLS will have made of it all by the time album number 4 emerges. It’s bound to be darker, heavier and even more bleak and it’ll be worth the wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment