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indie
pop, mellow core
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avant
indie,
post rock, post punk
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indie
rock, noise rock
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alt
rock, power pop,
emo
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garage,
punk, glam + other revivals
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alt
folk, alt soul
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songwriters
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Album Review: Everyone Everywhere (2012) - Everyone Everywhere
The new self-titled album by Everyone Everywhere finds the band about 5 years older, similarly jaded and existential, noticeably more confident in their “sound,” but eagerly expanding on their expounding indie rock. The group sticks with their buoyant lead guitar noodles, cacophonous crescendos, and nonchalant tenor, but the subtle additions not as present in their last album are what bring this one to life. The nine-track album is, if you focus on the lyrics, a fairly heavy affair. It recalls a man trying to paint a landscape while sitting in a windowless basement.
The tattered opener “I Feel Exhausted” is pretty emotionally deflating, but the music, which starts quietly, and at a distance, approaches with fervor and blooms declaratively. The songs continue to accelerate until its abrupt ending. While a “single” isn’t what it used to be, “$1,000,000,000” was the lead single for Everyone Everywhere. It is a yearning narrative, kind of a love song, though a rather dystopian one.
This album, in our opinion, is rather back-loaded in terms of standout tracks. This includes the skittering, straight-forward rock tune "Turn & Go & Turn” that has an awesome, gnarly, manipulated guitar solo that squeals its way into your heart, and makes the song a highpoint in the album. A similar song-making moment occurs on the following track “Fervor and Indifference in the Bicameral Brain” (good luck introducing that song drunk). The song is built on an acoustic guitar line, but is by all accounts rocking, especially when the tremolo lead is included. That being said, the song includes a breakdown, which is hinted at earlier, but later flushed-out with a sauntering banjo and woozy horn arrangement, all accompanied by singer/guitarist Brendan McHughs anxious theorizing about the helplessness of ones existence. It’s all quite romantic really, but also pretty depressing. If one was lulled into a daze from the previous song, Everyone Everywhere do their best to wake the listener up with the pulsing, fuzzed-out bass and drums intro to “No Furniture.” The uncharacteristic chorus is built on an Explosions In The Sky-esque guitar opposed by McHugh’s weary voice and lyrics. Often camouflaged by upbeat music, McHugh’s words, once focused on, become even more tender given the contrast.
The album closes with the adventurous “Wild Life.” It is restless, tender and youthful. Lyrically, it yearns to relate on a broad spectrum. The self-titled LP is filled with unanswered questions, not with the intent of answering, as much as finding new things to question. The band may prefer to play on a stage, if they are given the chance, but this new record finds the group on the same level of their listeners, not singing at them, but with them. You can purchase the album HERE. - Adam G.
Published on August 30, 2012
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June 2013
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Arrah and the Ferns
Make Your Mind
Arrah and the Ferns may have sweetness and light in abundance, but the undercurrent of frank lust in their new album is both new and old hat for these folk rockers. Since their last offering, they’ve adopted growing pains as a lyrical source, to varying effects. While the album relies heavily on much of the same wistfully-ornamented indie delicacy, there’s simultaneously an explicit element, and a successful one at that. Romance isn’t dead on Make Your Mind, it’s just got a mouth on it.
The woozy, low guitars at the beginning of album are one of many instrumental stunners, which we’ve long known to be a touchstone for the Ferns. There is some spectacular guitar and drum work on the album, but for most part, the music and the vocals go head to head in friendly tandem - never trying to outdo one another.
Arrah Fisher’s honeyed vocals push through the knot of winding guitars on the second track, “Go Back,” inciting her band to back her up when she half-purrs, half-belts “I see the way your body moves me - but you don’t have to touch me.”
“Triangle” is a list of questions, an effecting device used by Fisher to protest the coming of a different stage of adulthood - one in which commitment is inevitable and freedom to do as she wants a relic of immaturity. “I wanna meet the man on the other side,” she murmurs, seeing her free-spirited inclinations in danger, and then, with a bravado outburst, demands to know “Why do I have to grow up and be a married schmuck - when all I want to do is fuck...fuck...fuck...fuck...fuck!” The unbridled sexuality is startling, but when you think about it, the turbulence is a perfect underlining for sweet-sounding music about growing up and moving on.
The band then counters that song’s thinly-veiled hedonism with the role-reversing “Hang Up,” whose slow-dance 50s rock balladry finds Fisher imploring her lover to throw himself wholeheartedly into a new life. “This is where I hang up, start to pack my stuff up. I will come to you this time...I don’t want to have you on the side. I just want to have a normal time, have a normal life.” Is she embroiled in an affair? Is she coaxing him out of another relationship? Maybe, but it would seem heartless to resist her sincerity.
Make Your Mind has a welcomed, bouncing energy that picks the album up from its wispy, low-tempo tone halfway through. There’s a uniformity of pace, with most songs choosing a leisurely amble over an all-out rush, but the variance of tone and instrumentation saves the album from tedium, and adds up to an invigorating (and possibly final) effort from Arrah and the Ferns. - Alyssa Greenberg
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