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.

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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”

‘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”

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.

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So begins Lost Summer, the new EP from Talons’. If you’re not familiar with Talons’ then you should be. It’s primarily the recording work of Mike Tolan, although various others have contributed along the way. Tolan makes hushed, very sad songs which could be described as bedroom pop or post-folk or some other such phrase. All you need to know is that it’s really good. The great news is that Lost Summer is intended to precede a brand new album, After Talons’, which I am very excited about.

The EP plays 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. ‘Normal’ in that they spend the rest of their time anxious about this dysfunctionality and how apparent it must be to everyone else.

“And in between bands, I nurse my one beer and stare at the floor, wishing that I had an iPhone, so it wouldn’t be so clear that I’m not talking to anyone”

While the lyrics may seem like an internal dialogue, other sections reveal that there is a second part here, a signifcant other, and the words begin to read like a collections of worries, admissions of weakness and joy that are achingly simple. There are no grand promises, cinematic splits and reunions, no explicit declarations. Lost Summer says “I Love You” in a much more affecting way than any of that.

“When the plane went down/you were at home. But then the phone rang/but it was just me checking in from work. It slid across a road and into someone’s back yard and when it stopped- No one we knew died. No one we’d ever know died.”

Get Lost Summer on a pay-what-you-want basis via the Talons’ Bandcamp page.

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