Cut Apart, Pieced Together Again: The Handcrafted Music of Truman Finnell

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Ask anyone, and they’ll probably agree that being online constantly isn’t good for you: it’s all too easy to waste hours scrolling and switching from app to app. However, there are a few things that make the internet worth it, especially if you’re a music nerd like me. One of those things is exposure to artists and musicians so underground it’s by pure luck that you ever come across them. That’s how I discovered Truman Finnell, a creative based in Portland, Oregon. My bandmate sent me Truman’s profile on Instagram to show me his brilliant collage art. I was immediately drawn to his work, but as I scrolled his page, I noticed he also made music. ‘Cool,’ I thought and made a mental note to check him out later. Later came around, and I put on his most recent album, Fischer + Agnes, to discover that it was incredible. I was enchanted. Truman’s music is much like his artwork: a collage of magical riffs, toy-instrument synths, and fuzzed-out guitars that create a rich landscape full of depth and secrets.

And it begins to tear, by Truman Finnell

Prior to releasing his two albums, Truman started to compose his dream world with a series of delicately evocative singles. His earliest song, “Carpet Patterns,” was released in 2020, and this track proves from the very beginning that Truman’s art and music are inexorably linked. A variety of samples, instruments, and textures pull the listener in like Alice through Truman’s looking glass – we are in Wonderland, and every song is a delightfully eerie creation. Haunting imagery adorns the dioramas of his songs: in “The Black of the Geese,” Truman quavers through layers of his own voice, “Go out ye fisherman, I’ve strung five hearts to a fractured ring tied twice to trees appendages.” We, as the listener, are hesitant – scared, even – to step into the scene, but cannot stop ourselves from looking.

Finnell’s first full-length album from 2021, The Mountains and the Lake, is a haunting ode to sadness - wistful vocals reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens grace tracks with heartfelt acoustic guitar and warm layers of synth. Truman has created a melancholic yet cozy record that feels like staying home on a snow day with a mug of tea that somehow never gets cold. “Milktooth,” my favorite track on the album, is a bizarre experience that reminds me of how it feels to wake up at 2 am, half-dreaming and fully disoriented. The track begins with eerily distorted vocals, and as it progresses, things feel more and more like a dream as pitch-bending lends instability and a sense of dread: “Little train / slithering snake / shed your scales / in the union station / and I will try mine / in the hollering woods / of Abruzzi Italy” screams Truman, over rhythm so thunderous and eager that it trips over itself in a surge of emotion. Later in the album, he examines grief and remorse in “Bill.” On the song, Bill, Finnell’s uncle, asks him, “Nephew, don’t you think of me so often? Or / was my impression but as deep dug as my coffin? / Aren’t the roots below / just a reflection of the branches above? / Don’t the nightingale / sound a bit like the mourning dove?” 

Pressed Between Pages Unread, by Truman Finnell

Truman continues to tenderly construct a delicate collage on his next album, 2022’s Fischer + Agnes, soaking his soundscape with darker hues and gentle riffs that skip across the ear. If his first album felt like staying in, this one feels like having the courage to step out the front door and take a walk in the woods. “Shaved Head” is an aching and painful breath as Truman murmurs softly to himself, 

The mirror that held the self begins to melt
beneath the cleaners constellation
that I spread in hopes to disinfect
the oils from my fingers gathered
thick enough to linger through the
mornings measured nothing
once they’re preened
of all their smudges.

I’m reminded of the seminal scene from The Royal Tenenbaums where Luke Wilson faces himself in a mirror and, stricken with heartbreak, shaves his head while Elliott Smith plays in the background. While much of this album is calm and dark, the final track, “Pliers,” is reminiscent of the indie scene of the 2000s. The song is instrumentally exuberant like Regina Spektor and full of heavy pain like Bon Iver. “I know there’s a night like a key / on a ring you rely on to guide your thumb / to the right one to get you inside the house / And the pull that you felt for a life overrun by the songs that you hum never left / It sits chirping on your office desk.” We are left wondering, ‘Is this song about me? What night is my own key on a ring?’ while lush strings shimmer around us and fade into darkness.

To bring his discography current, Truman ushers in springtime with his latest song, “Palm of Thorns,” a gorgeous single in anticipation of an EP to be released later in 2024. Compared to his previous work, “Palm of Thorns” feels more experimental and avant-garde. Truman paints a picture of a lonely orchard, misty and damp, backed by the ambiance of crashing waves and murmuring frogs. “In the garden the apple is starting to move on its own / fallen, writhing with larvae / now clusters of mammals approach but don’t dare to push snout to the fruit, / bring a flame to its candle.” We are not alone here, for in the next breath, another joins us in the orchard: “But you / with drool on your face / and a bushel of apples pressed into your waist / just laughed […].” As I listen, it feels as though I’m watching cloudy memories through a View-Master, moving from snapshot to snapshot with erratic fingers. While the song begins with sparse instrumentation, it quickly builds through layers of synth and guitar, and Truman’s signature skramz vocals lend searing beauty to this melancholy landscape. I am loath to abandon the orchard, but dusk is upon us, and we must leave the figures here in silence. 

While I can’t always travel to the forest or the rocky coasts of the Pacific Northwest, Truman Finnell’s music is the next best escape. It will transport you to a quiet meadow, spotted with mossy groves of redwoods and deep, damp shadows. Wander through his elaborate collages of sound and part the branches to spot spirits of the forest, dancing in groves strung with bleeding hearts and haunted by the call of the mourning dove. Magic is real, and it lives forever here.

Britta Joseph is a musician and artist who, when she isn’t listening to records or deep-diving emo archives on the internet, enjoys writing poetry, reading existential literature, and a good iced matcha. You can find her on Instagram @brittajoes.

Sunday Cruise – The Art of Losing My Reflection | Album Review

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Lauren Records

The first time I got my heart broken, I was thirteen. I sat on the floor of my childhood bedroom with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, purple mascara flooding my cheeks, and cried to whatever sad breakup songs came up on YouTube. This would not be the last time that I felt agonizing pain after indulging in love, nor would it be the last time music became my only comfort. There is something empowering about having a soundtrack to your suffering, an energy that is difficult to pin down. Chicago indie-rock band Sunday Cruise confidently deliver that energy in their latest album, The Art of Losing My Reflection - a surf-inspired collection of pining love letters with dreamlike guitars and hooks that stick for days on end. Across twelve tracks, we are blessed with anthems of desperate adoration that convey one central message - there is an inevitability in longing, one that is ageless and incessant. At every turn of this album, I found myself faced with a million past selves, confronting the loneliness of heartache I felt from ages 13 to 25. If you’re looking for a generous rhythm section, dizzying guitars, and vocals as ethereal as the words themselves, Sunday Cruise packaged it up and tied it together with a silk bow for your consumption.

On the album’s first single, “Oh Lover, Why?” the quartet firmly established the dancy heartache that would act as the album's emotional throughline. Despite the heavily emotional topics the group explores throughout the record, the delivery is melodic and energetic enough to keep you grooving along. Everything about the music warrants jumping, dancing, and swaying. Lyrically, it begs, it pleads, it’s wrought with merciless abandonment. In spite of itself, by the end of the song, the affliction subsides into acceptance. It’s time to let the lover go and say goodbye.

Later on in the album, “Bitter” proves to be an instant classic. Lead singer Zoe Garcia dives in with deliberate exposition that seems to recall my own experience from high school - I dated a boy who lived thirty minutes away, and neither of us could drive. What the fuck do I do? “Maybe we’ll fall slowly. Maybe you’ll stay, and I won’t get so lonely.” The hopeful and dreamy lyrics are relatable beyond nostalgia - seventeen or twenty-seven, driver's license or not, sometimes you just crave ceaselessly for another person, the lingering cologne forcing you to the brink of insanity. “Bitter” delivers the waltz of wanting to run away with your lover both lyrically and musically.

The star of this album rollout is undoubtedly the music video for “Pretty Girl.” It begins with a viewer discretion warning that I thought was facetious - no, it was for sure required. It’s shot retro-style with focused lighting and floating florals that look like something Kate Bush would adore. The beginning oozes with femininity in its surface-level forms: white gloves, red roses, silk bows, you name it. The following shots delve deeper into where the video is headed with tape measures, pill bottles, and a friendship bracelet that affectionately reads “DIE.” A ballerina twirls mockingly next to a porcelain crucifix. It’s about to get real good.

I won’t spoil the ending for you because it’s something that must be experienced first-hand. Think worms, think the unattainable beauty standard, think the faceless monolith that threatens deviation from feminine expression. Heed the warning. Hold on to your teeth and fingernails.

As I kept The Art of Losing My Reflection on repeat, I couldn’t help but realize with every spin just how special this album is. It was subtle at first, something I couldn’t quite capture, but as I delved deeper into the album, lyrics, and videos, everything came together. By presenting heartbreak alongside such danceable music, Sunday Cruise perfectly encapsulated the enigma of love: the euphoric rush and the crash all at once. It came to me as I was reminded of my first girlfriend, who broke up with me on a suburban porch. I had purged from my mind the men I dated who, in retrospect, really didn’t like me that much, until the music dropped them at the forefront of my memory. The ongoing struggles of not being pretty enough or cool enough, of trying to prove that you’re even good enough- it’s all there, it’s all brutally honest, a comforting reminder that it’s all too common. The isolating feeling of unrequited love is something every single person on earth has felt. 100% of the human population have dreamt of having that one person, so close but so out of reach, finally in their arms. The extraordinary thing about this album is the way the band turns such longing into a comfortable hug. It’s okay, we’ve all been there. Here’s something to get you through it.

The Art of Losing My Reflection continues Sunday Cruise’s theme of infectious music and dire lyricism. It’s authentic, it’s beautiful, and it made me ache for the girl I once was. If my thirteen-year-old self could have heard it, she’d need a second pint of ice cream. If my fifteen-year-old self could have heard it, she would have probably made a few better friends. If my seventeen, eighteen, and twenty-two-year-old self could have heard it, she probably would have saved some wasted time from some less-than-fulfilling relationships. Until time travel exists, though, I’ll just be thankful I get to hear it now and consider it a gift - sorrow, silk bows, and all.

Sofie Green is an average music enjoyer from Milwaukee, WI. She is your biggest fan. Find her relentlessly hyping her favorite DIY bands from the Midwest and beyond at @smallsofie on Instagram and @s_ofs_ on Twitter.

Bedbug – pack your bags the sun is growing | Album Review

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Disposable America

When you’re on a long drive by yourself, it’s incredibly hard to fight boredom. In the Midwest, in particular, you can drive for hours only passing fields with no definitive qualities other than that some have cows and some don’t. After a while, this sameness can start to feel like an onslaught.

One way to combat this is to get romantic about your surroundings. You tell yourself that each field you pass, each rundown barn, each water tower, has a story. People’s dreams have, at some point, been connected to them. You’re not driving through a boring landscape; you’re traveling through a space where people live and have lived. When you bring humanity to what you're passing, you feel connected to it. It makes things more bearable. 

Bedbug’s new album, pack your bags the sun is growing, is a project that looks at the world through this lens. “I saw spirits on the highway driving home from your house,” Dylan Gamez Citron sings on the opening track “the city lights,” continuing, “built something crazy, could change it all for us, but what if there’s not much more than this.”

Throughout the rest of the album, Citron continues this kind of contemplation, connecting emotionally with abstract ideas and shapes like the sun's reflections, snowbanks, and the changing seasons. Driving, in particular, comes up a lot.

On “the great bonfire” they call dibs on shotgun before singing, “We were slow dancing cross interstate lines, we’ve done it for miles and hours pass and heaven abandons us.” In both this line and the one quoted earlier, driving is treated as meditative. It’s an act through which you can see spirits or feel a shift in the way the cosmos relate to you. 

Leaning so heavily into driving as the mode for this type of reflection is an interesting choice. We more often see feelings like this inspired by looking up at the stars or taking in the vast ocean. These more traditional catalysts for introspection can also be found in places throughout the album, but they’re never elevated as more powerful than the reflections that come from something as seemingly mundane as a drive home.

This is made even more explicit on the album’s lead single, “halo on the interstate,” where we hear the line “light refracts on the dashboard of my car, gives me halos on the interstate, the turnpike looks like heaven.” To be able to view reflections on your dashboard with the reverence one views the stars in the sky is something special. It takes an uncommon type of emotional literacy, and it’s this quality that is one of Bedbug’s biggest strengths on the record. 

Because the album is so lyrically rich, it is tempting to continue with just this type of analysis. There are so many themes that repeat throughout this record, exploring the emotional impact of living in a city and the use of sleep as a way to pass time more than to rest. To focus solely on the lyrics, though, would do pack your bags the sun is growing a disservice, as there’s so much beyond them deserving consideration. 

“the city lights” is a great opener for this record because it introduces us to Bedbug’s new sound. The track opens with Citron’s vocals over clean guitar arpeggios and pronounced bass, and while we’ve certainly heard all these things together on past Bedbug records, we’ve never heard them come through with such width and clarity. At around thirty seconds, there’s a cymbal swell, and then at around a minute, we’re hit with a prominent, real, full drum kit. 

This is the first record that Bedbug has recorded in-studio with a full band; as a whole, it feels like a step towards indie rock and away from bedroom pop (a genre Citron recently wrote a eulogy for) and a big part of this is the drums. In past Bedbug releases, the rhythm section has largely been filtered drum machines that ride along with softer vocals and guitar. That’s not the case here, with many of the songs featuring an unfiltered full kit sound from drummer Minerva Rodriguez that drives tracks forward, becoming an essential part of the mix. In particular, “The Great Bonfire!” features some great fills, and on “postcard,” it feels like a fuse has gone off when the drums kick in. This is still Bedbug; there are still the lo-fi bedroom pop qualities and great songwriting you’ve come to expect, it’s just bigger and clearer like you’re looking at Bedbug for the first time after cleaning off your glasses. 

The change in sound feels like a natural progression for Citron, who, in interviews, has made clear their love and admiration for Modest Mouse. This influence has been more lyrical than sonic on past Bedbug projects, but here, it shines through in the production, particularly of the vocals. There’s definitely some Isaac Brock, especially in spots like “Postcard,” where the full band is propelling the songs to a place where Citron can let loose and sing with an intensity we didn’t see when they were working with just fuzzy acoustic guitar over lo-fi drum machines. 

There’s a section in Citron’s genre eulogy where they talk about the newer music that apps like Spotify serve up to those searching for “bedroom pop.” This music often has the aesthetic of the genre without the ethic, sounding like, as Citron describes “studio-produced, groovy alt-pop, curated for Instagram stories and vibes TikToks.” This is a summation I don’t disagree with. There’s something uncanny valley-like about how the genre’s lo-fi qualities, largely born out of necessity, are now being mimicked by people purely trying to match a certain vibe. 

Ultimately, this sort of thing is almost inevitable as any genre evolves. From an optimistic standpoint, these developments speak to the impact that earlier bedroom pop has had on new artists who feel inspired to take parts of the genre and move in a new direction. One thing that I like about pack your bags the sun is growing is that it represents a different way that one can take these influences and evolve. It’s a record where the intimate feel and introspective lyrics of bedroom pop are expanded with grander instrumentation and higher-res production. There are certainly some fuzzy/lo-fi elements throughout the record, but the pursuit of these qualities is not what’s driving things. It’s this purity of approach that sets this album apart from a lot of the other music in this space, making pack your bags the sun is growing an impactful work worth listening to.  

Josh Ejnes is a writer and musician living in Chicago. You can keep up with his writing on music and sports on Twitter and listen to his band Cutaway Car here.

Once More From the Top: Thoughts on Anniversary Tours

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Eagerness died in the early 2000s with the icebergs and the American dream. Despite our weary bodies and crushing debt, millennials are more than happy to resurrect our enthusiasm the second a formative band announces an anniversary tour for a beloved album. We dress up our nostalgia in a jean jacket several sizes bigger than the ones we wore during the album’s original release and prop it up in scuffed Doc Martens, now outfitted with extra sole support. We wear the years on our face as we gather a decade (or two) later with a craft beer, often with a non-alcoholic label. Then, when the venues allow it, we set our eagerness down nicely in a chair so it can rest its feet.  

Over the past few years, album anniversary tours have grown increasingly popular. Some of the most significant records of our youth are reaching milestones, and the bands are going to let you know, dammit! The ennui-addled have the Ben Gibbard double-feature of Transatlanticism and Give Up by Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service, respectively. The angsty can watch the ten-year anniversary of The Hotelier’s Home Like NoPlace Is There paired with Foxing’s The Albatross. R&B fans can snatch up tickets to the 25th-anniversary tour of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and wait to see if the legend actually shows. Folk fans have My Morning Jacket’s 20th-anniversary tour of It Still Moves. Even the former Christian youth group kids, with their deconstructed beliefs and unused seminary degrees, can go see Switchfoot play The Beautiful Letdown.

These concerts tend to follow the same format: the band will go on stage to uproarious applause and start the first song. They’ll talk here and there about the process of creating the album and its lasting impact, then continue playing through the tracklist in order. If there is time left over (and there is almost always time left over), the band will play their lesser-loved songs while we nod along and pretend this isn’t our first time hearing them.

At their core, these types of concerts are meant to showcase the legacy of the band and, specifically, one of their most formative records. The audience is a combination of people who bought the CD upon its original release and newer fans who might have since discovered the music through streaming sites or a cool older sibling. Occasionally, you’ll see a preteen in the audience standing near a misty-eyed dad, simply happy to share this moment with his kid. 

Music has the ability to tuck you inside itself. To suspend memories that you’ll forget about until the song comes on years later. I know a man who refused to listen to any new music throughout 2020 because he didn’t want to find something he loved, only to be transported back to the dark months of early quarantine when he revisited it in the future. Several years later, he wandered into our group chat as though he had caught a helicopter flying over his deserted island, feverishly asking us if we had listened to Phoebe Bridgers’s Punisher. We poked fun, but I stopped doubting his decision when I recently put on “Garden Song” for the first time in a year and felt the loneliness I had since repressed. 

These anniversary concerts allow you to relive memories in real time. You’re no longer a thirty-something in a failing marriage getting priced out of your shitty apartment. Instead, you’re wandering across a quiet college campus, heading back to your dorm after staying a bit too late at your boyfriend’s. For a few hours, we live back in the dawn of our youth with the full acknowledgment that, after midnight, the magic will fade, and eagerness will return back to its grave. 

While the memories we dig up are often positive, the performances occasionally force you to come face-to-face with how much you’ve edited your perception of self. Because a few of the songs are typically kept relevant thanks to throwback playlists, you see them as sparks in a highlight reel. When you add in the rest of the album, you suddenly remember all the sticky parts of the past few decades. 

Language changes. Societal shifts. We continuously transform. This is often very good news as we slowly slog on toward progress, but it’s easy to forget how much of the process involves shedding our skin. When we’re celebrating an album from 15 years ago, we’re listening to a relic from a time before same-sex marriage was even legal in most of the United States. A good majority of the people in the audience have probably gone through some form of self-examination that has brought them to a new conclusion on social issues. We might think we’re pretty untouchable, but if we were forced to step up to a microphone and read our own diaries from ten years ago, we would likely wither in shame. During anniversary concerts, our favorite artists do exactly that. 

There is mercy in most standard setlists. They allow the band to curate an image for their fans to perceive. In 2018, for example, Hayley Williams announced Paramore would be retiring their most famous song, “Misery Business,” because of the lyric, “Once a whore you’re nothing more.” Over the next few years, she’d explain her personal growth and say that she was no longer comfortable performing a line filled with such internalized misogyny. In 2022, the song once again made its way into their setlists but was now accompanied by a short explanation of the outdated lyric. On their most recent tour, when it was time for the infamous line, Hayley would hold the mic out to the audience and let them decide whether or not it reverberated through the venue. While Paramore will always be known for that song, they still get a say in whether they want that reminder at every concert. 

On the other hand, you lose that ability when dealing with the entire album playthrough. Taylor Swift faced this challenge when releasing her “Taylor’s Version” of Speak Now. In the time since the album was first released, Taylor has tried to establish herself as a feminist icon, calling out the industry’s misogyny and nearly getting a television show canceled after they made a joke regarding her dating life. In the song “Better Than Revenge,” she quietly swapped out the lyric, “she’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress” with “he was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches.” People quickly noticed, and the typical energy of Swift’s rereleases was now divided as fans and critics alike picked apart the text. Some wondered if Swift’s actions supported this change while others debated whether it was all that problematic to begin with. To this day, the simple lyric change remains the primary conversation regarding Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). 

When you’re not one of the most popular acts in modern music, you get the chance to escape relatively unscathed. Sure, you may have done the work and read all the books, but you aren’t often forced to discuss this personal evolution. You can rewrite the setlists as needed, excluding whatever songs are painful to look back on. Anniversary concerts rid you of this opportunity entirely. Most likely, fans have spent weeks relistening to the album in preparation for this night, so if an artist wanted to exclude a song, it’s noticeable. You can either grit your teeth and play through it or offer an explanation. 

When The Hotelier was first actively touring, they decided to take the Home Like NoPlace Is There song “Housebroken” off their setlist. While they originally meant it to be an anti-establishment anthem, many fans had visceral reactions and interpreted it as a song that justified abuse. In 2014, the band released a statement on their Tumblr announcing that it would be retired out of respect for those crowd members. When I saw them during their St. Louis anniversary concert in 2023, they played the song with no discussion before or after. A few days later, Christian Holden returned to their Tumblr to address the readdition of the song. He admitted that, while he still stood by his original decision to nix the song, much of his previous reaction was fueled by youth and naivety. He concluded by writing, “And here we circle back to trauma not as a thing done to us by bad people, but now by people we love with every ounce of our being, people we wouldn’t throw out in front of a moving car. Many people will have their own interpretation of what that means to them, and I’ll let them have it. I’m just the messenger.” The band continued to play the song throughout the anniversary tour.

A similar situation came up when I saw Pedro the Lion this past summer for an anniversary tour of Control and It’s Hard to Find A Friend. The lead singer, Dave Bazan, has gone through a very public religious deconversion. For a period of time, the band was signed to the Christian record label, Tooth and Nail. Here, they gained a huge audience of angsty evangelical youth group kids who stayed with them even after Bazan was explicit about leaving Christianity. Before the show, I stood with several people I had never met before, and we all spoke about the comfort we found in the band after experiencing a parallel journey with our own faith. It felt as though we could have written these lyrics ourselves. Halfway through the set that night, Bazan paused the music between tracks. Looking as grizzled as ever in his plain black shirt and zip-up hoodie, he offered an apology, saying he now realizes how misogynistic many of the lyrics were. He then invited people to leave as needed so they could care for themselves. It was a stark reminder of how often the path to improvement is marked by giant missteps.

To be an artist means you’re constantly putting your innermost thoughts on display for the world to judge. As with everyone, you’re allowed growth, but performing anniversary tours forces you to address it firsthand. As audience members, we face a similar reckoning. Of course, we aren’t personally responsible for these lyrics, but they are a part of a band’s identity that we decided to accept as we became lifelong fans. It’s not comfortable to stand there in the crowd and hear a lead singer address the fact that our old favorites are seeped in misogyny and bias, but god, is it important. And while it might halt our trip on the time machine, it allows us to leave behind a layer of nostalgia that creates a faultless view of a time that was actually pretty damn harmful for much of the population.

Anniversary tours are likely not going anywhere any time soon. Most of the people from my generation feel hopeless, whether we’re thinking about rising house costs, increased fascism, or the very real threats of climate change. While the announcements of these tours make us reach for the retinol, they’re also a way to relive our youthfulness in one of the most immersive ways imaginable. At the same time, we’re going to have to continue facing the painful aspects of the past. In a few years, Brand New’s The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me will turn 20, and while I doubt they’ll have a tour, I’m confident we’ll be having a conversation over the seminal album while also keeping the misdeeds of Jesse Lacey at the forefront. Likely, we will see this with similar bands we let go of during the #MeToo conversation. 

The internet has entirely shifted how we talk about music from this era. The same technology that allowed us to listen to these formerly obscure artists has since brought about hyperawareness about the environment in which they arose. Even our nostalgia is painted with a shade of reality, forcing us to wrestle with the systems we once were complicit in upholding. Personally, I’ll continue to attend these concerts as long as I can. And while I’ll happily come home too late with blisters from my Docs and too much adrenaline to fall asleep, I’ll be grateful for the suspension of memories followed by a realization that I am still becoming a better version of myself.

Lindsay Fickas is a freelance writer based near St. Louis. When she’s not busy chasing around her kids or vehemently defending provel cheese, she is most likely at a concert, crying. She spends far too much time on social media, and you can find her on pretty much every site at @lindsayfickas. 

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.