Thirty Cent Fare - Time To Waste Away | EP Review

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I’ve learned many things this year about myself, about the world, and about those around me. One of the many things I’ve learned is to trust Acrobat Unstable implicitly. When they drop new tapes, I cop them. When they update their weekly Spotify playlist, I listen. Most importantly, when they sign a new band, I check them out.

This trust has paid off in spades; my cassette tape collection has grown exponentially, each week I am turned on to some new music, and every once in a while I discover a cool new band to become a diehard fan of. They’ve helped usher in releases from Short Fictions, Carpool, and Ultimate Frisbee, and that’s just in the last year alone. So when they announced they were signing Thirty Cent Fare for an EP, as the kids say, I had no choice but to stan. 

Blindly jumping into an artist can be a rewarding experience, but that feeling is amplified tenfold when their Spotify page has <1000 streams and doesn’t even have any related artists. That’s true blindness, that’s genuinely non-existent expectations, which means you’re forced to trust your gut. 

When I hit play on “Split The Ceiling,” I was met with a bounding instrumental that signaled within seconds that the label had done it again. Doubling as both the lead single and opening track,  “Split The Ceiling” is a dynamic and ever-shifting song that echoes a Title Fight sentiment over a distorted guitar and bouncy country-fried drum beat. It’s a warm and sunny welcome to the project featuring remorseful lyrics and a soulful guitar solo crescendo.

This sense of carefree summer-flavored instrumentation continues on the hypnotic “Falling Around Me,” where a glitchy electronic bed pairs with the far-off swirling croons of lead singer Scott Downes. From there, the band does an emotional-180 with “Counts For Nothing,” which deploys a jaunty Field Medic-like acoustic guitar riff under a twangy vocal for an effect that’s both driving and laid-back.

“This or Something Better” uses a gorgeous arrangement of vocal harmonies to evoke the feeling of watching a sunset from the comfort of your own porch with a cold beer in your hand. Meanwhile, the closing track “Time To Waste Away” sounds like a mix of The Berries and fellow Acrobat Unstable signees Charm, with the end result being a calming and assuring send-off.

For a 14-minute project from an artist I’d never heard of, Time To Waste Away is a marvel. It’s new music in a familiar package that acts as a picture-perfect soundtrack to your late-fall evenings and amber-tinted afternoons. This is an EP that feels designed to appeal directly to your inner hiker and soundtrack your next seasonal adventure. It’s a release that welcomes you in warmly, cradles you for a mere 14 minutes, then sends you off to conqueror the world, or at least some tiny part of it. It’s the soundtrack to wasted afternoons, lost hours, and aimless adventures. However, if anything, Time To Waste Away is just an affirmation that time enjoyed is never time wasted.