“This past year was pretty nightmarish for me – a grandmother whom I was very close to passed away after quick mental decay and hallucinatory visions, a dear friend attempted suicide by pill overdose, I left a long term relationship, and our original guitar player quit to form a new band.  My whole world flipped in a matter of months and all of the songs I began to write were dark, brooding, wallowing meditations in sadness – and quite frankly, I didn’t like it. So I hired a new guitar player (who became our producer/engineer, too – Dave Cerminara) and asked the band to help me write a record where I could be honest and scared and confused, but that remained upbeat with bright, happy melodies. I didn’t want to sing sad songs with sad music because depression sucks.”

This is a perfect summation of the record, fast-paced, energetic and strangely celebratory in terms of sound, yet lyrically honest and quite often dark to the point of bleak. From the laid back psychedelica of ‘Close Call (Adderall Anxiety)’ and ‘Sneakin’ Out’, to the heavy riffs of ‘Liar’ and ‘Yr House Isn’t Haunted’, the songs are shot through with a detached sense of doom, an understanding of personal weakness that obliterates any chance of sentimental hope or self-absorbed melodrama. The feeling is captured perfectly on the punky ‘Tomato Tomato’:

“Id rather suffer than recover from my daily addictions
because at least I know exactly what it is I am getting
its nice to feel like I am in control in control of something”

But that does not mean personality and humour are absent, far from it. ‘It Was Mine (the Whole Time)’ is a cheeky tale of teenage audacity (although is kind of sad if you think about it too much), ‘Sun Spits’ utilises some impressively weird descriptives (“the car crawls like a saturated centipede”) and the blackly triumphant sing-a-long refrain of ‘Thru The Night’ is hard not to love. All together now… “I made it through the night! I made it through the night!”

To put it simply, Shaky At Best is an album about people addicted to trouble, folks gripped by a love-hate relationship with chemicals and loud noises, stuck within the paradox of crippling anxiety coupled with a good-time death wish. It’s about living too hard as a way to escape thinking too hard. Sometimes ideals and bleeding hearts can’t save us, and it’s up to people like Shaky Shrines to make us feel less alone.

You can stream Shaky At Best in it’s entirety below, and buy it from Bandcamp right now.

If you like what you hear, be sure to check out Shaky Shrines’ previous releases, including a 7″ out on Velocity of Sound.

–

The post Album Premiere: Shaky Shrines – Shaky At Best appeared first on Various Small Flames.

So opens Best Boy, the debut album of Oxford Collapse frontman Mike Pace in the new guise of Mike Pace and the Child Actors. Well, with a bit of imagination. Maybe it’s just my overblown reaction to the news that a major part of Oxford Collapse is back and making music. One of the well-respected-but-only-moderately-successful bands that saw me through the mid to late 00s, Oxford Collapse represent a good time in my life, a rose-tinted period filled with new experiences and old comforts. Aptly, Pace’s album is concerned with these very things, exploring the promises the past made and how our future selves are still looking back at them. After the initial triumphant build-up, ‘Up the Academy’ sets out this idea of uncertainty and unfulfilled dreams, “And we hope and we pray like we did yesterday that everything’s gonna be fine”, and even more global views about the lack of the utopia that was expected. “Cracks increasing, Continental Divide… Moral compass clearly not aligned”.

If all this talk of unfulfilled dreams has you expecting a dour album then think again. Listen to ‘Summer Lawns’ and tell me that it’s anything other than joyous? Even with lines like “And we drive on highways past abandoned stores stocking things we always wanted but could not afford.“ Tracks like ‘Summer Lawns’ and ‘Cold Calling’ typify the generally straight-up and sincere attitude Pace employs, an all-so-American blend of joy, hope and disillusionment. ‘The King of Corona’ is a pop song in the best sense, a catchy chorus, slight melodrama, a sprinkling of 90s cheese, but it still manages to confront expectation, disappointment, loneliness etc. in an interesting and nuanced way. Similarly, ‘Kiss & Fly’ goes for the stadium electro-rock feel, channelling Springsteen and Simon, without losing sight of the important stuff: “’Someday soon we’ll be alright,’ he said with conviction while locked out from the inside.”

Best Boy is for the children of the 80s and 90s, reminiscing about the age where entertainment exploded, where VHS tapes and cable TV transformed us into constant consumers. Of course, as consumers we were sold promises, told we merely needed x, y and z to be happy and successful and pretty and popular. It’s kind of ironic that a time built on visions of the future is now seen as a utopia locked in the past. Pace gets at this feeling by writing feel-good songs tinged with longing, nothing too sad or serious (80s/90s kids don’t take ourselves too seriously), nor a Father John Misty-style ironic assault. Instead, Best Boy is a wistful celebration of what we had and presents some convincing reasons for why we feel the way we do.

The album is being released on the 13th January. Check out the official Mike Pace and the Child Actors site for more information. Stream the album over at Stereogum and watch the video for ‘Fire Sale’ below.

The post Mike Pace and the Child Actors – Best Boy appeared first on Various Small Flames.