With a name that evokes the grandest gestures of Faulkner and his title source material in the fifth act of Macbeth, that old line about "sound and fury, signifying nothing", the sweeping, synth folk of Sound and the Urgency steeps itself in two signifiers that deny being signifiers. On "White Kids", Sound and the Urgency find this sort of interstitial tension appealing, crafting a head-nodding slow burn about, "white kids from the plains", a scathing rebuke of middle American mall kids. It is, of course, written by a white guy from the Pacific Northwest. No one said this would be simple; and it isn't. The chorus, "I'm sick and tired of everyone" implies a critical turn inward, a magnanimous self-flagellation, an admission that we are all tied up in these failures. If they are disgusting, so are we. It is this distinction which is harder to parse or at least makes our ivory towers a little harder to inhabit. Maybe the mall kids watch Portlandia. The aesthetic is beautiful as rich synthesizers lay over a breezy acoustic progression and the loneliest lead guitar you'll hear this week."White Kids" is a fantastic slice of dark pop, electronic folk that, even in this post-modern analysis, absolutely means something.
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