Flatbasset Radio's Album Of The Week for the week of May 8th-14th, 2016:
The Person & The People - Dark And Low
01. Paranoid And Sleepy
02. Ideal Situation
03. Hot Summer Nights
04. Sleep All Day
05. Leaving
06. I've Seen This Place
07. Until The Morning
08. Since You Loved Me
09. Go Back Home
10. Tonight
11. Misbehaving
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| (The Person & The People by Katie Essick) |
However, for me, all of that has been gravy, because I've been looking forward to this new The Person & The People record for weeks. They've appeared in this AOTW column twice before and both times I've been pleasantly surprised by what they've brought to the table. Debut EP Zen And The Art Of Popular Music was an intriguing debut, mixing solid hooks with some jazzy guitar work. Second full-length LP What A Drag found the band eschewing the guitar work for a Superdrag-meets-Superchunk style hook-fest. It ended up being my 8th most played album of 2014 despite the fact that it came out in December of that year.
All of which brings us to Dark And Low, their second full-length for Land Ski Records and, relevantly, the always important third full-length. As any student of pop music knows, the third album is always the one where a band has to make a leap of some kind. Bands that are in it for the long haul often make a definitive statement on their third album (think The Queen Is Dead, Parklife, Sebadoh III) where as history is littered with bands who couldn't make the jump (Intimacy, anyone?). It's not a hard and fast rule, obviously, but it's worth remembering in this instance.
Before even pushing play on this one I knew it would be a departure for the band. Opening track "Paranoid & Sleepy" is listed as 6:19 minutes long, making it the longest song in their catalog. And they've chosen it to open the album.
Rather than take their sound in a radically new direction, however, "Paranoid And Sleepy" finds the band revisiting the guitar work of Zen, combining it with the hooks of Drag, and then blowing the whole thing out widescreen. The claustrophobia of their last album is nowhere to be found. If that record was Superdrag-meets-Superchunk, Dark And Low is Superdrag-meets-My-Morning-Jacket. Everything from the guitar work to singer Nick Costa's hooks to the vaguely ELO-ish background vocals all have their own plateaus to stand on as the band builds up this mountain of an opener, climaxing with a three minute twin-guitar solo that rivals "Impossible Germany" as one of the great guitar moments on my iPod.
Guitar histrionics aside, when Costa sings, "I know I bring you down, and I don't blame you, 'cause I'm such a bummer," he's essentially providing his thesis for the record. When his voice returns to open "Ideal Situation" he describes a desire to move to the mountains without telling anybody, taking "some legal drugs," and melting into the carpet as that ideal situation. However, in the second verse, his focus has shifted. Now he'd like to live in the city, get a decent job, and have some kids. The root of this indecisiveness? A significant other. One whose affection he desires so greatly that all of his desires are placed against how she would react to them. Don't let the hooks fool you, this is not a healthy approach, and Costa spends the rest of the record reckoning with his insecurities.
"Hot Summer Nights" finds Costa volunteering to just be friends over a welcoming mid-tempo groove. The pace picks up on "Sleep All Day," a brilliantly catchy ode to drunken jealousy. Where these songs could be read as laments of the heartbroken, the emotional fulcrum of Dark & Low is in companion songs "Leaving" & "I've Seen This Place."
"Leaving" puts to bed any doubts as to just how Costa ended up in this dark space. Though the music is driving, it takes a back seat to the distraught & disoriented Costa who can't come to terms with the loss of someone. Whether this is friend, family, or companion isn't clear, but when Costa opens the second verse with "hair down to his toenails" describing this person as "a ghost from a movies, a frightened mouse" it's clear that whatever this event was, it has left him in struggling (which, in turn, certainly reframes the seemingly trivial trials of the album's first half as yet more snow in an avalanche of struggles).
"I've Seen This Place" picks up from there. "I get by, but hell, man, I sure have to try..." lets us know that Costa's moving on from whatever that traumatic event was, but it's a crawl, and it isn't being done easily or happily.
Yeah, that's a little heavy for just the first half of an album. Fortunately, TPATP dust off a song that's been in the works for at least a year in "Until The Morning," stepping back of the lyrical precipice and reminding us that a chiming guitars and good hook have redemptive power. "Since You Loved Me" is a piano-heavy lament to a former long-term lover residing in that terrible place where neither person has changed their mind about breaking up but neither is convinced it was the right move and trying to rectify those conflicting ideas would upset their current comforts to the point that it's probably not worth it. With it's Beach Boys harmonies, it's an anthem to manageable discontent, which makes it very nearly the most depressing moment on the album.
On "Go Back Home," guitarist Sam Sanford makes good use of his lone vocal lead on the album. His softer voice is nice counterpoint to Costa, which makes opening line "I wish my friends would die before I do..." sound a lot more playful than it should. "Go Back Home" also features the brilliant return of the dynamic guitar solo, somewhat absent since the opening, and it's brilliant. For power-pop, this is a pretty heavy album, and this solo provides a sort of flying-V-on-fire moment to lighten the mood.
Oddly, for an album that lays so much on the table lyrically, it almost feels like there's a scene missing as the band closes the record with "Tonight" & "Misbehaving."
On "Tonight," Costa concedes "I don't believe in anything..." before staying in, getting drunk, offering a half-hearted invite to somebody, before eventually deciding he doesn't need to see that person tonight. It's the sound of a man who's made his peace with the fact that most things are out of his control. He's letting the stress of whatever occurred in those earlier episodes go, relatively content with the fact that there's nothing to be done about them now. In fact, he seems to find a bit of wonder in that knowledge, when he sings "if you get bored we can find a bar, I'll end up staying out late, but I always do, and it really isn't all that far," Costa's dismissing the day-to-day anxiety of life, seemingly amused by the realization that his decision will not actually have any real world consequence outside of whether or not he gets enough sleep.
He takes that concept to a logical conclusion on "Misbehaving." "I can't try to understand your emotions, a person is gonna feel what they're gonna feel..." he sings, a far cry from the man who spent the first couple of songs on the album trying desperately to understand someone else's emotions. "I can't wrap my head around what you've been going through, all I know is my love for you is real," he sings, offering up unconditional love before concluding "I could understand if you don't want me."
I apologize if I'm making this album sound like an emotional slog (or if I'm seeing a narrative where there is none. I've been known to do that). However, after putting out several albums where the hooks were placed front and center, the open nature of Dark And Low is just begging for a deeper reading (also, the album's called Dark And Low). Honestly, as a fan of The Person & The People, I find this to be a fascinating album. The sugar-rush of What A Drag has been replaced by more mature songwriting, more interesting structures, crazy guitar solos, peaks, valleys, strikes, gutters... It's a good look for a band who probably could have kept cranking out 3:00 songs and found a steady home on The Current. However, they challenged themselves to open up, think bigger, dig deeper, and make an album that would require the listener to embrace those challenges as well.
If you'd like to check the album out for yourself, head over to The Person & The People's Bandcamp page to download a copy for yourself (just $5!). Head on over to the Land Ski Records page for more info about shows and such.
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