It Seems Just Like A Dream

The Rock*A*Teens “Across the Piedmont”

This song is nearly 20 years old, but I’ve only known it for a little while, after Carl Newman from The New Pornographers was tweeting about his deep love of The Rock*A*Teens. “Across the Piedmont” hit me right away and has been lingering in my mind for months. I wish I could have known it around the time it came out, mostly just so I could have an additional 19 years of it in my life.

The two most striking things about The Rock*A*Teens is their distinctive use of reverb on guitars, which lends the music a ragged ’60s garage rock aesthetic, and Chris Lopez’s incredibly emotive voice. Lopez sings with the maximum level of commitment, to the point that he’s often pushing his voice beyond its natural range because he clearly would not settle on underselling any feeling. The lyrics of “Across the Piedmont” are vivid in their specificity but vague in narrative, but Lopez belts out key lines with a red-hot passion that makes you wonder why he’d have such an urgent feeling about “the summer when I turned 23” in the first place. He’s implying so much more than what’s in the song, and that I can’t quite figure it out just makes it all the more compelling to me. I don’t know why he’s got this melancholy and nostalgia, but I am definitely acquainted with this emotion.

Buy it from Bandcamp.