Without beating around the bush about it, our general optimism has totally fucking tanked the past few weeks, if not a lot longer. Everything around us is being stripped and sold in real time in the throes of Neo-colonialism, and suffice it to say, it just makes it that much harder to embrace the day to day.
However, exploring new music always helps center our mind, and while hopping through today’s releases, We Used to Cut the Grass‘ new LP actually managed to reach through our mental muck and shake some sense into us.
If you too need a shakeup, which we highly recommend, get your fix below:
We Used to Cut the Grass sets themselves apart from the pack in more ways than one, but one essential ingredient to the band’s magic brew is the heavy presence of brass, strings, and piano. This kind of getup is rare in math rock, and admittedly we’re stretching a bit to call it that, as it often gels far more with big band ensembles and the music of drum-line competitions. But it’s never just any of those things, and in our opinion there’s not a dull second on it, with compositional and instrumental chops abounding on tracks like “The Comet is Not Coming” and “Shep’s Encounter.”
In fact it’s gleefully ironic that the band’s second LP is grounded in not taking itself too seriously, because it allows them to change risk into opportunity, even if that opportunity is a punchline or non-sequitur. The general sense of ‘let’s try it’ brings it all together – after all, there are things on LP #2 that absolutely shouldn’t work, but totally do. For instance, we completely forgot what was going on when the already dreamlike “Hot Vegan Summer” Trust Fund Ozu feature melts into a BWW advertisement with “WRKM Bulletin (Uh Oh),” subsequently taking us down to New Orleans on “Post-Nuclear Tourism.”
In our heads, we quickly dismissed it as something like ‘oh, we must have been streaming that on YouTube instead of Bandcamp, and uhhh, ads have been getting weirder lately…” but then he starts talking about podcast radicalization, and then she starts talking about Chicken Milk. That shit rocked us hard, and dammit, that’s exactly what we needed today.
(Thanks for reading! If you’re looking for more music, check out our Bandcamp compilations here. If you like us, or possibly even love us, donations are always appreciated at the Buy Me A Coffee page here, but if you’re in a generous mood you can also donate to folks like Doctors Without Borders, the PCRF, Charity Water, Kindness Ranch, One Tail at A Time, Canopy Cat Rescue, or Best Friends Animal Sanctuary that could probably use it more – click on their names above to check ‘em out if you’re so inclined. Thanks again!)