Safari Room – Time Devours All Things | Album Review
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Self-Released
I feel like an absolute goon whenever I talk about nostalgia. It seems like the last decade or so has been nothing but a series of nostalgic media assaults, one after another, all trying to grab our attention. The funny part is that it works on me every time, without fail. Perhaps this is why I’m so reticent to even talk about it. Nostalgia is such a perpetual fuel for my enjoyment of things that I tend to catch myself thinking back more often than forward. The mind will tie threads and seek connections without you even noticing it. Time Devours All Things, the third LP from Safari Room, is a latticework with fringes of 2000s alt-rock acts woven with the band’s distinct personal lyrics and history.
I wish I could really put my finger on what it is about Alec Koukol, Safari Room’s brainchild, conductor and creative engine, that seems to pull this thread of nostalgia in me. Opening track, “The Great Outdoors,” feels like it could've been a Purevolume find of mine, one I would happily blast while deciding if I should steal or pay for that one Kaiser Chiefs album. There is certainly a type of aughts rock presence that Koukol seems to be occupying, but don’t get it twisted; the album’s sound is clearly his own.
This is not a role Koukol takes lightly, especially as changes in the band's makeup caused the project to shift away from Safari Room as a fixed unit. Instead, Koukol has been framing himself as the “ring leader of a musical circus” with a revolving cast of musicians behind him setting a solid foundation for the album's sonic journey. When many would bluster, Koukol instead winnows, while others would hard left between melodies and staccatos, he meanders right through croons and arpeggios. A troubadour navigating the inevitable march of time, and yet here, the clock's tick functions not as a device to harry and rush, but as a metronome through which the moments of the album are set and measured.
Themes range from sad and fractious, touching on the natural conclusion to a once close relationship (“Broken Things”), the pangs of a lonely life (“You Are a Ghost”), to a thriller-tempoed takedown of spineless politicians and our failing system (“The King”). All have a unique distinction from each other, as each track on the album does, parsed out and pieced together across 38 minutes. At different times, the unshakable 2000ness of it all ebbs, and I remember I’m in the present day, listening to something that is a 2024 release, devoid of tight v-necks and dance-clap rhythms.
On songs like “Crease in the Blinds” and “Groundhog Day,” we can find Koukol erring on the mellower side of 2000s emo alt-rock ala Taking Back Sunday’s “...Slow Dance on The Inside” or New London Fire’s “Nadine.” Tracks that would be saved for night sky wandering eyes or half-glazed-over gazing out dusty windows on crisp autumn days. Yet this also is where Time Devours All Things becomes less a cultural snapshot of influences and talents and feels more like a sort of time machine. In and out of each song, the push and pull of past and present gives the listener the feeling of escaping and entering the jaws of time, like the big and little hands zipping around each other, wrapped up in its melancholic march but still marching all the same.
Sure, there’s heartbreak and dissolution and panic and uncertainty, but ultimately, we’re all staring down the same yawning maw of eternity, whether we want to or not, and this becomes the great equalizer for us all. Despite some greener compositional moments, Koukol does seem to be figuring things out with this new band format he’s adopted, this is as promising a step in the right direction as any of his previous works with a more consistent backing band.
A search for answers punctuated by that ever-present memento mori whisper, Time Devours All Things is grand in concept yet humble in its delivery. Through its course and narrative, the album’s subtext of dimensionality, of forward, back, here, now, the unfixable metric of time as a place, with nostalgia as a ghostly mile marker where we rest and look back on our lives while trying to process the now, offers us a faint glimpse past the familiar into oblivion.
Elias is a southern California-based music writer relishing the recent screamo renaissance in the area. You can occasionally find them bugging bands about their old forgotten projects on the podcast Not Just A Phase, where they also write reviews for the blog. Their handle @letsgetpivotal can be found across multiple social media platforms, including Instagram and Twitter.
