Saturday, September 17, 2016

Other Side of Night


I don't remember when this came out.  2006?  It was some point in what appeared to be Small Brown Bike's break-up that one of the singers, as well as the singer of another Michigan band called Charlevoix, teamed up and put out a demo for this song under the name 'Shipwrecked.'  Somewhere in there, the two singers got married, and not long after, they became LaSalle and released two albums.  Neither album became very popular.  They were decent albums, but not particularly enthralling.  Except for this song.  I prefer the demo, but I'm too lazy at the moment to craft it youtube-style.

There's something about this song that was such a different direction from either of the previous bands.  Small Brown Bike wasn't quite a hardcore band, but too hard for the stuff we called 'emo' back then.  Clearly, the songs were all anger-sad and about all those angsty young-adult problems, but man, at 20 years old, Small Brown Bike was such a relief.  Around those times, I was a commuter student with at least a 45 minute drive to school.  I would scream along to the Bike, hoarse by the time I got home.  Their first albums were quite cathartic, if given the right attention, but I think to most passersby, they sounded like a more ramshackle Hot Water Music, but I prefer to think that Small Brown Bike preferred the blurry space between the lines.  Charlevoix was in the same vein and a bit more angular and clean.

And then this song came out and went a completely different direction.  It's soft.  It's obviously sad.  Why is it so sad? The singers had just put out these hard albums and here comes this soft, delicate number to cry in the rain to.  A couple years later, they put out their second album, then I guess faded into obscurity as Small Brown Bike put out a couple more albums.  I still prefer the Bike, but I miss this sort of departure.  It makes me wonder what other musicians would put out if they had time to take a breath.

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