Strumbrush, Fate Again

In the opening track of Fate Again, the newest record from Atlanta indie-rock band Strumbrush, you’re peering through the eyes of someone attempting to flee reality, or maybe trying to return to it. The narrator scrambles through this liminal space grasping to make observations, hearing an unidentifiable voice calling to him. In the end he seems to finally transition into a new world; “Out of the haze / Out of the daze / Out of the maze / I'm sort of awake now,” vocalist Foster Wells yelps, finishing off the lyrics halfway through the song before it descends into patterns of instrumental turmoil. 

(Photo: Keely West)

As is true for the album as a whole, the sensorial world here is disorienting, spiraling, cyclical. Drums clash in time with a riffing guitar, striking like the second hand of a clock. It breaks down and rebuilds itself repeatedly, balancing chaos and calm on a knife’s edge. Even in moments of relative sonic reprieve in songs like “Soil” or “Into Gold,” the instrumentals still suggest that disquietude has only been staved off temporarily. At intervals, gently pulsing psychedelia erupts suddenly into something more like post-hardcore, rendering the song as a whole into a sort of dampened panic. 

There is a constant push and pull between illusion and reality on Fate Again, with the two taking turns folding in on themselves. The ominous “Someone Doesn’t Want You To Know” sees the faux world becoming more hostile, and the narrator becoming aware that the state he is in has been partially imposed upon him. “Well I saw / Red in the water / Someone doesn't want you to know / Well I saw / And I heard / Heads above water / Someone doesn't want you to know,” he warns. 

The lyrics of “Rot” bring us back below the water, referencing a contrastingly head-in-the-sand underworld. Distorted vocals lure, “I fell down here / Sink for hours / I feel good.” Surprisingly, the narrator offers to lift the listener up to the place he’s sunken down into, reinforcing the idea of its liminality. “I can make you rot,” he finishes, turning this space into one that’s less comfortable than he’s made it out to be. Just after, the feeling of hostility encroaches again with a repetitive guitar riff momentarily breaking apart the lulling movements of the rest of the song. The narrator’s awareness of the illusion world seems to invite the ugliness of reality in, anyway, and the line between the two becomes blurred, the purpose of escaping in the first place rendered moot. The illusion breaks further in the next lines of “Blindfold,” “Something's breathing / I can see him through the cracks / I'm just trying to get some rest.”

The idea of cycles, of hidden worlds and the “real” world is reflected in the album artwork. The twisted path of a cicada circles the plane, surrounded on the borders by moths with watchful eyes patterning their wings. Much like the insect, the figure in Fate Again spends much of his time occupying a hidden world, forced from it for brief moments by the nature of the cycle he is in. The songs themselves, though, in all of their contortion and experimentation, crawl up from their earthy beds and break the frame of their subject’s limitations, unafraid to roll around in the dirt from which they came.