Judging Stuff by Covers is What I Do Best

Because what happened was, as per usual, I was at the bookmines, in the music shaft specifically, and came across this album:

It's Frightening

Now I hadn’t heard of White Rabbits, but the image was of interest to me. In fact, more and more recently, I’ve simply picked things up based solely on covers and, you know, I’d say that my success with finding decent things to read/listen to/watch has probably gone up. So that’s a quick way of saying that White Rabbits second full length album (if wikipedia is to be believed…) “It’s Frightening” is worth listening to, but I hadn’t thought so on the first listen through.

A bit of personal history. When I was very young, say 8 or 9, I was listening to bands like Anthrax and Slayer. The gods of music were benevolent enough to let me discover Bad Religion, Black Flag, and the Circle Jerks around the time I hit my teens. So, even from a young age I’ve always had a thing for music that is…explosive.

Regular readers will know that I have a really broad interest in music. But if I were stranded on a desert island with one album and it wasn’t Suffer I’d slit my throat with a sharpened stick.

Ever see Walk the Line? Remember the part where June Carter asks Johnny Cash how he can write music the way he does…steady like a freight train, sharp like a razor? Well, I’m not sure that sharp like a razor is a reasonable simile for White Rabbits, but steady like a freight train sure is fitting. So fitting, in fact, that I think that was what bothered me about it at first. Every track on the album, in fact, is so steady that each one filled me with a sense of longing. The first time through I kept waiting for each track to explode, to really break free from the initial beat established in the opening seconds, but it never happened. The entire album is tirelessly paced, but in such a way that the songs often feel just a bit slow, but after listening to the whole album I was tired. I’m not sure exactly how the band was able to accomplish this. It’s not as if the album is composed of long tracks (nearly all of them run under 4 minutes) or contains an inordinate amount of them (10 in all). All I can think, honestly, is that the steady nature of the beats that are established allow the other pieces of the band to operate with more subtlety. In fact, the first time through, I thought that all of the songs were fairly simplistic, but it wasn’t until a second listen that I realized just how complex most of the tracks are.

So what I’m saying is that this album was one that snuck up on me. I sometimes find that albums I love from the first moment lose luster after a while, while ones like this get better with age, as I come to more fully appreciate what it is these musicians have put together. And so now I will leave you all with a video of the first tack “Percussion Gun.”