A review of @knolacollective’s new record, “To The Rhythm”
by Matty Weaver
I meet up with some old friends. It’s raining. It’s been years and time has left its mark on all of our faces. I’m not sure how to act, so I just do me: the new me, the one I saw myself becoming back then, give or take a few degrees of stormy gray morality.
It felt a lot like going back in time, like seeing the same old same old with newer eyes, like taking off rose-tinted glasses and smiling, staring.
Roll credits.
This is not an easy feeling to evoke through music. In 2016, amidst a resurgence of late- 90s emo bands—and the fall of their late-naughts children—we’re almost oversaturated with half-cocked throwbacks to a genre that started too early and never seemed to truly end. Always on the cusp of reinvention, everyone born and raised around the scene gnashed their teeth at every passing year, waiting for its inevitable death.
Enough rambling. What am I actually going to say? Oh, yeah: Knola has made an incredible record.
That feeling of coming home to a group of people that accept you for who you are, even though you spent years apart, fell down, got back up, changed jobs, changes cities, won, lost, lost everything, gained something; that is a very special feeling and the idea that an album can encompass that is, to me, nothing short of a miracle.
But that sounds pompous. It sounds overblown, hyperbolic, stupid.
But it’s true.
Knola has risen from the ashes of so many other notable groups that listing them here would be a waste; and if you’re reading this, you already know the band’s past, so let’s talk the future: what comes next?
To The Rhythm is a solid follow-up to last year’s debut The Black Beach, a powerful EP wrapped up in five short songs, none of which show up on this full-length. The songs keep the same vibe—sickly-sweet crooning, strong-boned bass, hard-hitting drums and earringing guitar—but it’s obvious that they’re in a league of their own, every previous note and word a stepping stone to this release.
The album starts off with thirty-four crashes exuberant crashes and a twang ringing out, strong words of otherness, “I’m part of the crowd / my head is down,” sung as if muttered under one’s breath, a mantra to make it seem like we’re Moving Along—a fitting title for the song, ending on the loftiest of declaration: “I’m moving along.” The slow fade brings us back down to the ground with Weight, which drives slowly until the end, where the first hints of emotive outburst end in a crescendo, leading into the lead single on the album, Cottage Grove, where the crowing of “I’m afraid they’ll swallow me / if I don’t find find the words, / the weight of expectation’s loud / It’s faceless but it’s heard,” refrained.
The real theme of the album shines through in these next two tracks. Here, we see the pressure of following up on your previous ventures, of turning your back on what came before and focusing on what comes next. In Fabric, the image is of a live performance, where the room is going mad: "Everyone’s shoving, / I’m suddenly shirtless / but I don’t hear a thing. / I’m torn like the fabric / I move to the rhythm, / I trust everyone will sing.” The song has this hazy, wavy feeling that’s almost unsettling, like being an observer to something you shouldn’t be.
That feelings persists through Ruby Beach, and only seems to subside as we lead into the ambient Earth Noise and its droney second-half, House. “I wish there was a way for you / to see inside my chest,” comes the cry: "That my heart is still for you / But if I leave it’s for the best.” Again, we have an image of trying to move forward, despite how we may feel about— or better still, how we lack feeling for—those who once surrounded us.
Winter Skin is the natural second single in this album of slow build-ups and cohesive segues. Standing tall on its legs but not overpowering the other tracks on the album, its lyrics resonate (I would quote but I don’t think a sample does it justice), and it boasts the most impressive interlude/outro (outerlude?) thus far; it’s a song you won’t want to stop listening to.
But alas, the characters are taking their positions for the ending scene, Fireworks. The question is asked: "Have I ever seen fireworks / at a funeral before?” The credits start to roll, and halfway through the song, everyone takes off their glasses, punching out the frames. I follow suit, my movements in sync with the beat.
The music is simple, repetitive but so dreamy and so peaceful; the kind of arrangement you can just listen to on loop forever. As we drift, the drums cut and all that’s left is feedback, rising, then an abrupt nothing, like suddenly waking up.
It is a fitting end to an album about keeping pace and following the rhythm of life onward, even when it seems like everyone expects you to stay the same.
written by Matty Weaver
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http://knolacollective.com (@knolacollective)
http://skeletallightning.net (@skeletal-lightning)
