Fluxblog
May 31st, 2020 9:52pm

Spit Out Your Gum And Sing Along


Shudder to Think “Survival”

Shudder to Think’s 50,000 B.C. is technically the group’s final album but is nevertheless a transitional work that falls between the odd collision of post-punk and prog rock on their 1994 classic Pony Express Record and the genre-hopping pastiche found on their late ’90s soundtrack work and most of primary songwriter Craig Wedren’s subsequent work outside the band. The prog elements and Wedren’s fascination with fitting his melodies and lyrics into odd meters remain, but it’s all smoothed out into a bright, shiny tunes that foreground the glam rock that was previously buried beneath all the jagged edges of their music.

“Survival,” the most overtly glam song on the record, is built around a slinky melody that makes the most of Wedren’s glorious vocal range and wry attitude. The lyrics allude to his fairly recent experience of surviving cancer without directly announcing it or even necessarily being entirely about that topic. About a quarter of the lyrics are written in Wedren’s abstract absurdist style, but he sings lines like “grease the temple” and “balloons light the lawns” in a way that suggests he has a very precise personal meaning in mind that’s just not for us to know.

The rest of his words sketch out the mood of a man who feels some gratitude for his luck, but also a bewilderment when it comes to what to make of his life in the aftermath. He sounds like he’s attempting to weigh the significance of a lot of things – why he got spared, the value of particular relationships, the prospect of not doing all that much with his new lease on life – and all the scales are broken. I think when it comes down to it, this is a song about shrugging off all the heaviness of meaning and learning to just enjoy the simple pleasures of being alive and getting to write a song, and another one after that.

Buy it from Amazon.

RSS Feed for this postNo Responses.


©2008 Fluxblog
Site by Ryan Catbird