We last wrote about Mike Tolan’s Talons’ back in October, an EP that played “like the internal musings of a normal person. That’s ‘normal’ in that their thoughts are filled with an honesty and sincerity so earnest that it comes off as a certain brand of weirdness”. Tolan is back with two brand new songs which continue the experimental post-folk of his oeuvre.
The title track is about what happens to punks when they get old and reading about the hardcore scene in the New Yorker and playing bass in the mirror to Rage Against the Machine as a teen. It’s about getting older and becoming a person the old you wouldn’t believe, about settling for comfort and contentment over raging against the machine:
“But I guess its better to be angry
even when you don’t totally understand why.
No wait – that’s a total lie.
Never thought I’d end up like this
Generally trying to ignore the fact
that the world’s going to shit
Rolling my eyes at the kids”
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‘Driving Toward the Smoke’ begins with a glimpse of a face from the past, a girl who our narrator may or may not have gone to school with. This leads to ruminations on what life has had in store for the girl in the intervening years:
“Did you marry your high school boyfriend
or did you end up breaking up?
Weren’t you going with that dirt biker kid?
with the track in his back yard
I heard he got into Oxycontin, which sucks.
Life is hard.”
Like the title track the song addresses the passing of time, that sense of vaguely sad wonder about the people you knew and how things have changed. The second half of the song leads on from this, as if the recollections force the narrator to take stock of his own life. Like a lot of Talons’ songs, the tone is decidedly DeLillian, that well-meaning, post-9/11 pessimism, the result of living in an age of twenty-four hour news bulletins beaming constant loops of impending doom.
“And I know I should be heading home
Instead I’m following the smoke
Looking for the flames over the tops of the trees.
There’s something in watching things dissolving that makes us
realize that we’re alive and small and lucky
every day that everything’s not falling apart”
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It’s basically Talons’ doing what they do do best, well-written bedroom folk songs for the quietly confused and existentially anxious. You can grab the songs from the talons’ Bandcamp page.