![]() ![]() “This version takes that approach and applies it to a song that was always built around a huge hook. “A lot of this album came about from working at home, and listening to a ton of ambient, loop based music.” says singer Dylan Slocum. The album features reimagined & alternative versions of the original 2020 release and today they share the beautiful new version of “Kick” The fact that they do this through a brilliant album is just a nice coincidence.LA based quintet Spanish Love Songs have announced “Brave Faces Etc”, due out 15th April 2022. But what the LA quintet do is offer a doorway into your own thoughts, to explore your own internal thoughts, and, hopefully, let you answer it for yourself. By the end, Spanish Love Songs strives to answer that unfortunately widespread question, as people suffer from and for a myriad of reasons. “Am I going to be this down forever?” he asks at the start of the album. ![]() ![]() “We were never broken/ life’s just very long.” Much like how life never suddenly breaks down - rather, it’s a long, step by step process that snowballs into your own nadir - Brave Faces Everyone shows that, in the same way, the climb out of that pit starts with the first step. “I feel like burning down my life again/ I watch the fire spread over my skin”, he admits on the title track closer Brave Faces, Everyone but rather than wallowing in sadness, or nihilism, or cynicism, like the lyrics suggest, the songs seem to break through the pessimism, the despair. It’s when the tracks are full of barely contained rage, and anguish, and fury, that the album comes into its own. Character stories, depicting suicide, and addiction, and debt, and death, and everything else.īut it’s on songs like “Optimism (as a radical life choice)” as he screams “don’t take me out back and shoot me/ I know my circuits are faulty/ but I’ve only ever been a kid”, where the band explore both the ongoing mental health epidemics sweeping across the world, with a lack of help, as well as (if loosely) the now somehow blasé subject of school shootings and the atrocities that precede and inspire them, that Brave Faces Everyone shines. Like Manchester Orchestra, or Trophy Eyes for instance, the band is based primarily in the lyrical truth. Even when it takes off, it somehow hangs onto that lyrical dependence and that’s what makes the album brilliant. Opener “Routine Pain”, for instance, starts almost acoustic, relying simply on the lyrics and harmonies to carry the track. Each song is ordered chaos, with each element adding its own inspired musical bursts, and it somehow still ends up producing ten intrinsically unique songs. From the outset, lead singer Dylan Slocum’s desperation tinged vocals plead - sometimes full of hope, as he asks “it can’t be this bleak forever?” into the void at the end of “Self-Destruction (as a career choice)”, or the imploring “Dolores” sometimes hidden in what can only be described as self-loathing, as in “Routine Pain”, and sometimes in cathartic anger, as with both “Generation Love” and “Kick” - over rousing guitar riffs, pounding drums and surprisingly melodic harmonies. Brave Faces Everyone, the third full-length release from LA punk quintet Spanish Love Songs, has one thing to say: you might be hurting, but you’re not alone.Ĭalling this album punk would be a discredit to the sheer brilliance of the ten songs featured throughout it would edge the album away from the limelight and into just another release hanging from the genre umbrella. ![]()
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