8.13.2012

Cold Showers :: "BC"

When everyone got sad it meant no one got really sad anymore. Depression became the new uncouth, so common it was borderline impolite, and a huge drag as so many other Americans learned to play next to the abyss. Everyone was having such a good and bad time, Brett Easton Ellis could write a novel about it. After all, depression is at an all-time high, tripling in the last two decades. We, literally, are three times as sad as we were in 1992. It's easy to feel divided about this. Cold Showers do their best interpretation of the downcast New Order aesthetic on lead single, "BC," which is just as frigid as a group of angular guitars and washing synthesizers can be in a solidly post-1980s age full of misplaced optimism and kids in florescent tank tops and face paint. Our profound cultural sadness, the old stomping grounds for bands and artists of all ilks, has been replaced with a permanent adolescence where everyone has both a really great and a really terrible time. Everyone and no one feels sorry for themselves, but no one feels bad for anyone else. Empathy is at an all-time low. So lead lyric, "oh, woe is me," represents a brand of stylized and entirely morbid moroseness we have largely forgotten. It hangs a pallor over the whole affair, a downcast notion only enforced by its repetition. Like the darker New Order singles - "Isolation" is decent point for comparison - there is no dynamic shift between verse and chorus on "BC," just a slicing orthogonal of refrain into the vanishing distance. It is a world unto itself, just enough for you to feel bad about yourself and someone else at the same time.

No comments: