#OK OK OK MY DEMONS SONG HOW TO#
No band should ever need to justify the fact that they exist, but How to Tune a Parrot is an unsatisfying listen because it feels like nothing was learned since they began making music, with the truly satisfying moments of sonic growth finding themselves relegated to the tail-end of a heavy onslaught. How to Tune a Parrot is just under 29 minutes, though, so while that amount is 1/5th of the album it’s on, it still leaves you wishing that the preceding 24 minutes sounded anything like those final minutes. “This Enemy” barely surpasses the two-minute mark, so when combined with “Remind Me,” you’re treated to a grand five minutes where the band’s true future feels clearer. The effect it has is strangely instantaneous, as closer “This Enemy Is My Best Friend” returns to the densely-packed guitar distortion but packs a substantially-cathartic wallop: “ My demons keep telling someone me I’m not OK/ My demons keep telling me to go astray/ Everything’s fragile feel like I might break,” Siera sings over the towering noise around him. In under three minutes, you get an infectious and weird glimpse into an alternate future for the band, where they stop trying to bludgeon the listener endlessly, and instead work on creating peaks and valleys worth exploring.
It doesn’t really deviate from the formula very much, but it does establish a hypnotic groove, and when combined with Siera’s echoed (and not screamed) vocals, you end up with a heady combination that would have made early-era !!! feel proud to have made it. The most frustrating aspect of Parrot is that they save the best for the near-end - “Remind Me Who’s Suffering” is the album’s penultimate track, and it’s far and away the best song here. This theory falls apart when you remember all of the outstanding songs from Worldwide, like “Negative Thinking” or “Moving Forward,” songs that manage to lodge themselves in your head for years while still falling well under the two-and-a-half minute mark - which would be on the short side on this record.
One might feel the urge to chalk that up to the length of each song each of the album’s 12 tracks range from the 1:38 “Fall Down” to a comparatively garish “Remind Me Who’s Suffering,” which comes in just shy of three minutes. Every song whizzes by without leaving anything resembling an impression. In fact, if you listened to the noisiest parts of Worldwide, and simply imagined it with better production, you’d be pretty close to the same tone and sound of Parrot. Opener “Overload Damage” is a classic blast of noise and power and Johnny Siera’s screamed vocals - but it never really ascends to be more than that. From the get-go, Parrot feels like the band has always felt. It might have been easy to hope that they’d found a balance between the noise-punk and the heartfelt, but How to Tune a Parrot is, instead, just like Worldwide but without the bright personality that existed within it.
#OK OK OK MY DEMONS SONG FULL#
Maybe the band knew that they needed some distance from that pain - which is maybe why How to Tune a Parrot came a full decade after Michel Poiccard, with just the four-track King Babies EP in 2014 to punctuate the silence. It was a noble experiment, and one that’s difficult to look down your nose at without feeling like a bit of an asshole. While inarguably the most tragic fact is Velasco’s death, it’s also tragic that the blend didn’t work very well - the album felt somewhat half-formed at times, with many songs that could have met the cutting room floor easily. The Death Set continued in the face of adversity and released Michel Poiccard, an album that attempted to fuse their wild aesthetic with the very real trauma that they were experiencing because of the loss of Velasco.
Then tragedy struck: within a year of Worldwide’s release, founding member/singer Beau Velasco died following a drug overdose. That debut, Worldwide, was a little like the very first Sleigh Bells album, Treats, in that it made you want to punch someone in the face in the best possible way. When their first album came out, Australian noise punks The Death Set seemed like they could sustain their energy forever.
0 kommentar(er)
