Vagabonds – Going Somewhere? | Single Review
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Self-released
I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop my whole life.
We sprouted in the shadow of Golgotha, all of us tender shoots withering, competing to see who could muster up the most self-loathing. We thought guilt was virtuous. If we filled our proverbial shoes with rocks and kept on walking, maybe we could be worthy.
Every time I think I’ve broken the cycle, it catches me — this nagging sense that my luck is going to run out and some kind of karmic retribution is going to come crashing down. It’s hell, but it’s familiar, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that kindles dread and chokes out dreams, rinse and repeat. I’ve looked for relief in a lot of different places over the years, but how do you outrun your own mistakes?
The new song from Vagabonds, the longtime moniker of Michigan’s Luke S Dean, is one minute and 18 seconds of smoldering release, a panic room on fire, and a feeling I know too well. Even the title scans as taunting: “Going Somewhere?” it sneers, insinuating the impossibility of escape. It’s one of the most propulsive and urgent Vagabonds songs to date, driven by greyscale washes of dimed-amp feedback and a chorus of despondent vocals, somewhere between Control-era Pedro the Lion and the emogaze dirges of Greet Death.
The track is Vagabonds’ first since The Pasture & The Willow, a meditative chamber-rock epic and one of my favorite records of 2023, and the contrast between the two releases is stark. “Going Somewhere?” comes and goes as quickly as your heart dropping when you miss a stair that isn’t there in the middle of the night. It’s a form of rock song that’s tricky to execute well, the kind that catches you off guard with its brevity and makes you want to run it back immediately.
In a meta sense, by simply recording and releasing this snapshot of a shame spiral, Luke has interrupted a cycle. In their own words, “I’m releasing it now, not as a part of any specific album or as a part of any ‘cycle’ or ‘era’ but to break my own bad habit of sitting on songs years before putting them out.” As increasingly broken and bleak as the music industry feels right now, the ability for artists to release music whenever and however they want remains one of the coolest parts of DIY to me, and I’d like to see more bands doing this sort of thing for songs that don’t have a home on records. And while there isn’t even a sliver of light in this song’s subject matter, there is liberation in expressing it. An ancient text said it well: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
Nick Webber lives in Denver, CO, where he makes music with his friends in A Place For Owls and under his own name.
