It is a damp day here; the fog is hanging low over melting snowbanks and the ground where it shows through is dead-grass tan. Which is perfect weather for listening to an album - EP? What does seven songs count as these days? - full of weird, mythical, seems-to-be-about-breakups songs. I'm not sure how else to describe Bang, Empires' newest release.
Empires as a band do it the newfangled, Radiohead-type way. In December, they posted the title track as a free download. In January, “Damn Things Over” and “I Know You Know” were posted - $2. In February, “Strangers” and “Intruder” – pay what you want, with a minimum of $2. Today, two versions of the album were released, made up of the previously released singles and two new tracks, “Voodooized” and “Hello Lover”. There’s a hard-copy pre-order option as well as the digital download. The deluxe edition gets you another b-side, “Animal”, an eight-minute video and a bunch of guitarist Tom Conrad’s photography.
(Basically, for all of this, I have spent $27. A $2 single, a $5 single, the $7 + $3 shipping pre-order, and then another $10 for the deluxe digital download when I realized I’d been a dumbass and bought the regular version instead of the deluxe. It’s cool, though, $27 is actually a drop in the bucket considering how much they’ve gotten from me in the last two years.)
One of the things I’d liked so much about Howl, their 2008 release, was that each song had a separate and distinct sound. “All Night Long” didn’t sound like “Midnight Land” didn’t sound like “Believe!”. When the Howl singles dropped, I missed that separate sound. But the actual album listened to in order breaks up the solid guitar layer. “Voodooized” doesn’t smash you like “Bang”, which opens on a screaming “I’m sick of banging with your skeleton / you were gorgeous ‘til you gave out all your skin” and doesn’t stop screaming. Instead, “Voodooized” is a notch lower, a little slower, and then in the middle there’s this jangly guitar bit that made me go “Oh, hey, I have heard this live, because this is the part where the tempo is not made for dancing!”. (This is driving me nuts because I can’t find video proof on YouTube that they’ve played it. I could possibly be mistaking it for something else. ETA: Figured it out. Same thing happens in "Darko". AHA.) It moves into “Damn Things Over”, which needs an apostrophe, but we’ll ignore that. What it does have is a good audience participation part, because rest assured, Sean will make you clap before the “I keep rolling down through the world to find you / asking all the fakes and the awfully confused” verse, and lyrics that make me wonder if it’s a Orpheus and Eurydice spinoff the way that “Midnight Land” is Inferno. The speed picks up from the opening track, another step towards the smack in the face that “Bang” will be, having been moved to the third track.
This one has been around, but the lyrics were different and there was a tambourine (from the Snakes & Suits acoustic tour with The Academy Is…) and the evolution of it has been interesting. It’s not often I see a band enough to hear a song change like that. It started life as the oddly titled “Blue Crush” and I remember talking to Sean after a show in DeKalb once and him telling me it wasn’t going to stay “Blue Crush”, that he had a new awesome title for it. Then it got called “Bang” and I went “…really?”. The shouting about banging up his heart to get you is fairly new, at least new in Empires-land (where “Intruder” has been on tape since at least the end of 2008); it wasn’t like that until the single came out.
“Hello Lover” opens with this – “Hello. I love you. I’m leaving.” – and way to break someone’s heart, Sean Van Vleet. This is a definite slowdown from “Bang”, but it turns into something with just as much sound. Like how “My Poor Lover” live used to start out quiet and turn into noise. In fact, I listened to “My Poor Lover” just now to sort of compare/contrast it against “Hello Lover”, and it hit me what I’m missing in Bang - the piano. Why lose the keys? It’s like where the keys would be is instead a lot of “ooh-oohs” and such.
In December of ’08, I saw Empires in Omaha, and their SUV needed a jumpstart. In exchange for providing this, I was allowed to listen to “Intruder” and one other song that I can’t place – it might have been “Bang”, it might not. I described them to someone the next day as “something heavy-sounding, and something catchy about not being allowed in someone's home or something like that?”, and for more than a year, “Intruder” stuck with me. For weeks after Omaha I was annoyed by the sound of the chorus in my head because I didn’t really remember hardly any of the lyrics, and it was probably six months before it made it onto the set list.
Truth: It might be my favorite out of all twenty-odd official and semi-official songs that have been released altogether. I don’t know enough musical terms to explain exactly what particular moments work to make this song just - work for me, but it does. It’s my “Anywhere” for this release. The composition, the way the different pieces of it fit together.
One of my dad’s major complaints about the singles as they stood before today was that there was too much sameness. Yeah, “Strangers” and “I Know You Know” slowed it down a little, but not distinctly enough to break up the complete wall of sound that “Bang”, “Damn Things Over” and “Intruder” create. The two songs added to this final release bring that moment you can catch your breath a little more – three songs if you count “Animal”. In fact, I really like “Animal” – it reminds me more of the early b-sides we got with their homemade CDs at the first few shows, but with more polish. A little more grown up. But back to getting some space – imagine, if you will, Bang as being in the middle of a dim room packed with people all dancing until the sweat drips from them, singing along until their throats are hoarse – you can see how a moment to catch your breath is a welcome pause.
(PS: Try listening to “Intruder”, then “Under the Bright Lights”, and then “I Know You Know” – it works amazingly well.)
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