Bitter Melody
Open City's Hands in the Honey Jar
I was original going to write an essay on how songs can contain whole months of life experience in their 2-5 minutes of play time depending on the circumstances in which I first heard them. My wife shared a song with me the other day that was of such a specific time in our lives that within twenty seconds of listening to it again I was feeling all that growth and experience in a hyper-saturated emotional short hand that is dizzying.
But Open City's album Hands in the Honey Jar was released yesterday, and I need to write about that instead.
For being a band that is so fresh to me, (I think it's fewer than 3-4 months since I heard them for the first time), they're a contender for most reliable listen.
I think I read an article at one point that painted Open City with Fugazi influences, and that's probably where the emotional tether is for me. I also posted the song "Black Veils" from the self-titled for one of the "You'll Make it to the End" installments.
I think it's also safe to make some reference to Maelstrom-era Oathbreaker. Nowhere near as "blackened", but something similar.
Also a Self-Defense Family familiarity in the sometimes almost "instructional" straight forwardness of the vocal delivery.
What I think is keeping me so interested in Open City is their really fluid movement from aggressiveness to earnestness, not that either is exclusive of the other, they're just really identifiable in Open City songs.
[I'm re-listening to "Black Veils" while I'm writing this particular paragraph and it may be a perfect song. The chorus man...FUCK]
Music in the hardcore and adjacent genres can get really tedious sometimes. Heavy for the sake of heavy. Mosh for mosh's sake. And I've been in a headspace recently where music that is of one specific emotion is tough to listen to. It's just a lot of work to listen to really uniformly aggro music for a long time.
"Lukewarn", the second track on Hands in the Honey Jar, is a tight 2:29 that is aggressive. But the guitar riff in the verse section has a strong major key thrust that sits juxtaposed to the vocal delivery that is mostly a mid-range bark.
"Return Your Stolen Property Is Theft" is another good example of carrying melody within an aggressive context. The verse has that "instructional" style of singing I was talking about. It's fast, but kind of sedate at the same time. Open City's vocalist Rachel Rubino moves from spoken-ish word to bark to melody to flat out screams so smoothly. She sings over a chorus riff that again has a major key uplift to it.
It's music that cascades from angry to jubilant to melodic to atonal back and forth and back and forth.
I think that having an instinct to hum along with a song is a testament to its musicality.
What the band refers to as their most "Revolution Summer" track, "Everything", has strong....hummableness...hummability.
Open City is a band that is emotionally rich. Rubino has a talent for shifting between sung, spoken, barked, and spewn vocals, sometimes from syllable to syllable. The music fluctuates just as rapidly from hummable melodies to grim-faced riffs.
These tend to be qualities of a band that make me pay attention to lyrics more because if a band is so talented at managing a realistic kaleidescope of human emotion, then the lyrics are probably just as thoughtful.
I want to know everything about everything and I want to be good at everything I do I want to know everything everyone else knows maybe I want to be god? or in the very least considered smart? idiot take a seat find me in the back raising my hand skip right over me I want to feel how it feels to be listened to i’m motivated but discouraged easily I want to see everything everyone else sees when they look at me and think, “they have it easy” idiot get some sleep find me in my room, it’s 3am I’m doing better, I guess compared to what? compared to when? an attic apartment a room for rent a vacancy in my head it’s all in my head | ||||
Brooklyn Vegan has a great track-by-track interview with the band.
If you want to continue the discussion, send me an email or put it through the snail mail
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