Opener ‘Work Stories’ has rumbly, reverby guitars and Tolan’s signature vocals, a downbeat, unhurried sense of an apocalypse far more subtle and sly then those we read about in books. That sometimes unshakeable feeling that the world is going to shit:

“There’s trash blowing all around the parking lot,
a PetCo cart on its side on an island of mulch between
the Ulta and the Starbucks:
Is this what the end of the world looks like?
Or is this just life?”

There’s a similar sense of doom and defeat on ‘Rabbit’, a great big rattling thing full of an almost tragicomic sense of disbelief. Take for example the titular rabbit, its presence one of desperate confusion for the narrator. I mean, how are we supposed to save a dying animal when we can’t even decide what to eat for lunch without asking our iPhones for help? The track then moves on to fear of disaster more human, that creeping dread we all feel due to the nightmarish outpourings of 24-hour news channels and an economy that seems to have deserted those of a certain age bracket. “He rode his bike right under a bus / some days this goddamn city’s too much for me” Tolan sings, “so let’s go run away out into the woods /LOL, baby, maybe just grow the fuck up /I’m 31 and wearing a baseball hat to work / drowning in debt with no prospects, living from check to check”. To me those few lines neatly sum up what this Talons’ project is all about, where it’s come from and where it’s going, beamed from what must seem like an endless existential crisis.

Work Stories is perhaps the loudest, most expansive Talons’ record to date. Tracks such as ‘Life in Debt’, with its pulsating electric guitar, and the sad and squally ‘Toms’, sound a world away from the basic acoustic-guitar-and-vocals set up of early releases. The exception that proves the rule is closer ‘Tired of IPAs’ a poignant and meandering acoustic song that reads like an anti-anthem for unhappy millennials, for the hordes of young adults still smarting from the dissipation of all those hopes and dreams, of trying to grow up and become more pragmatic and living in fear of losing more than their childish silliness: “I got tired of irony when I was 28 / Of making fun of everything, realized I actually thought that Fleetwood Mac were great / But when I stopped laughing and tried to ‘grow up’, I just saw the stupid and the sad / And I got cold and lost inside my head.”

Much of the release wrestles with similar thoughts. ‘Had to Work’ is about trying to go out at night to recapture youth only to find the old haunts stripped of their familiar furnishings and up for rent, while ‘Bonnie Billy’ bemoans the fact that no-one at work listens to Bonnie Prince Billy, or have even heard of The Microphones. “But what do I expect?” Tolan sings, “that was over ten years ago”.

If you’ve made it this far you’d be forgiven for thinking that Work Stories is pretty heavy going. And it is in its own way. Rather like its narrator, it’s not an album bursting at the seams with optimism. It explores the pervasive disillusionment in a society that hasn’t yet lived up to what it promised, a society run for interests other than those of the people who make up its majority. A society that offers hopes and dreams of resplendent lives in exchange for your hard earned $$$s, education courses that leave people stranded with more knowledge but no money, opportunities or sympathy. These are songs for people who wonder ‘when did it become not okay to do what I want with my life?’

But the final lines of ‘Tired of IPAs’ offer some hope. If not a remedy then at least a coping mechanism, something to hold onto as you go about your days.

“What am I doing? What am I going to do now at 32 without a plan?
I guess I’ll keep making things
Try to make do
And find goodness where I can”

And I think that’s as close to an answer as we’re going to get. Although it can be sometimes almost impossible, there is still lots to love in this world, a lot of good things to see and do and a lot of good people to help and be helped. Listening to Tolan’s music always feels to me like him leaving a lamp on. It’s never going to erase all those shadows completely, but it sure is nice to see that warm and friendly glow. Work Stories is a reminder that it’s okay to occasionally feel afraid or sad, that the things which trouble you are probably not as much your fault as you think, and most of all that, despite how it might sometimes feel, there are such lamps on all over the place, you are never, ever, alone.

You can get Work Stories as a name-your-price download from the Talons’ Bandcamp page. You can also get a beautiful screen-print of the artwork, designed by Charlie Wagers and limited to 100 hand-numbered prints. I’d seriously consider contributing any way you can. If there is a better release (or series of releases) than this in 2016 we’ll be very lucky indeed.

The post Talons’ – Work Stories appeared first on Various Small Flames.

If you’re anything like a regular reader then you’ll know that we love Talons’ here at WTD (like a lot), and after seeing Linklater’s film it struck me how they share common methods and goals. The second release in a series of four EPs (more on the third soon), Growing Up pulls a similarly bewitching and indescribable effect, pushing the buttons labelled Love and Sadness and Nostalgia and Death Anxiety all at once and ever so subtly, so that none can be said to be the presiding emotion. ‘My Life is an Endless Outro’ opens the mini-album and sets the unhurried and reflective atmosphere immediately. It sounds like a soundtrack of a wordless driving movie, all grainy analogue film footage of corn fields and motels rushing past open windows on a humid and grey summer’s day, but also has the trademark Talons’ self-deprecating, life-deprecating attitude:

“He blew a tire on 65 North.
Hit a retread in the road- was he looking at the wind farm or down at his phone?
Went across the median, towards the truck that I just passed.
I was on the phone with you, complaining about my job.

Will my last words really be so trivial?
Alone in a rented Scion cube, I’ll slide off into nothing.”

‘Milwaukee’ is about as noisy as Talons’ have ever been, the swirly background fuzz and percussion taking things a lot further than the simple acoustic recordings we’re used to, though it’s still cloaked in that same sense of reluctant apathy. I can’t think of another band who could make the line, “Milwaukee tonight smells like the mall in middle school” sound so resigned and nostalgic and sad. But the standout line comes later in the track, a line that to me sums up everything Talons’ stand for, the whole aesthetic in twelve words:

“Its funny how life can be so rad sometimes
then its not”

‘All That Hasn’t Burned is Drowned’ is classic Talons’, the lyrics reading like the kind of poem that makes me wish I could get into poetry: “The house across the street from us is burning down / I woke up to the heat on my face (I guess the wind must have been blowing the other way)”. Then the instrumental ‘Song For Carissa’s Wierd’ puts acoustic guitar over that looped, feedback-type sound that worms its way into several of the tracks, while ‘Richmond’ is a song that highlights Tolan’s knack for sounding simultaneously sad and hopeful, “As the sun rises somewhere in western Virginia /  You’re the only thing that’s in my head / And I won’t lose you again”. The effect is really difficult to explain, like pain and joy rolled into one, and is exemplified by the reference to listening to Boxer back to back repeatedly, one of the albums we leant on until they became the redemption we needed, the albums that make it hard not to look at past troubles with something approaching fondness.

‘Song for Bass VI and Joe Golden’s Vibrochamp’ is another instrumental, featuring Keith Freund (of Lejsovka & Freund and formerly Trouble Books) on bass clarinet, before the two-part final track emerges from faint sound recordings. ‘Growing Up (Part 1)’ opens with the most important lyrics on the record, a summation of the titular themes, before transitioning seamlessly into ‘Growing Up (Part 2)’, the instrumental finale/epilogue. The closer plays like Boyhood if the camera had kept rolling, if the boy graduated and became wary and weary and had to try to make a life during a global recession.

“Is growing up just getting better at letting yourself off the hook?
At learning not to look?
(or to look away from the things you could change but don’t)”

The fact that the above lyrics are an explicit explanation of Growing Up shows just how subtle and indistinct the record’s themes are, though that’s not to say they are not felt keenly. Indeed, if anything they are too immediate to properly describe, charting history in the present, emotions and trends which define us so closely we cannot get a good view of them. I guess that’s the point of art, to convey the things that we can’t yet put into normal words. Talking about this kind of stuff directly somehow feels wrong, like it should be left to David Foster Wallace to make sense of with Charlie Rose or something, but the feel of these songs capture something. If someone was making a time capsule and wanted to show a civilization in 4016 what it’s like to be alive (and of a certain age/social class) today then I’d play them this.

You can buy Growing Up now from the Talons’ Bandcamp page.

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