Run, Forever “Settling”
Every once in a while, in your lifetime, you’ll meet a certain sort of band, usually through recorded music, and you’ll say to yourself, “Man, if I was going to make a band, I’d want it to be this band”. And I’m talking about wanting to be The Beatles or the Rolling Stones or having this dream where you get into music and start a band because you love Hot Water Music so you strive to make a band that sounds exactly like them (You know who you are) And I’m not talking about the general sense of music where you tend to wish you made all of it that is good just because you’d like to feel like you really contributed something with your life. No, I’m talking about the simple fact that you feel like if you had to write songs, in the sense of writing out lyrics and then music to accompany them, you would imagine it as coming out at its best and sounding like this (Even though deep down inside myself, I know I could never make anything this good)
Far too many bands these days are whiny. If you’re going to cry about something, at least make it something worth crying about. It seems like too many bands want to cry just to cry—and worst of all they want you to cry along with them. The fact is, to find a band that can complain about things like life and seem genuine in their efforts are few and far between. (Yes, after typing that statement, I fully realize that Few and Far Between was once a band)
The last time I heard an album that struck this kind of chord with me was Bayside’s “Sirens and Condolences”. It just evokes this raw emotion that doesn’t make you feel like a whiny high school brat, but rather someone who has become jaded by the world in which we live just because we have simply experienced life.
One simple line in “Sun Bruised”, “I don’t want to be somebody / I just want to be okay” along with another line from a different song, “It seems like I’ve been bitter forever” go to show what type of mood this album is in. But it’s not a be-sad-and-cut-yourself type of album at all. It lands somewhere on the musical scale between Piebald, Jawbreaker, The Hotel Year and, of course, Bayside. The occasional female backing vocals do also add a nice bit of change to a classic standard.
I don’t recall what I was doing the first time I heard Bayside’s “Sirens and Condolences”, but it has been an album that both musically and lyrically has had a profound impact on my life, in and out of music. “Settling” is very much the same. You cannot describe it in any better way than to say it makes an earthquake, heart attack or near fatal car crash impression on you. In a world where music without soul run rampant, that is a very accomplished feat indeed.
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