Review Summary: Four heads, yelling today.
Group singing is an expression of community, creating a sound that prioritizes shared power over individual intelligibility. It’s an expression of consensus, shared feelings shouted through the air. On
The Cold In Every Shelter, Brighton band I Feel Fine combine this collective approach to singing with signature math-rock instrumentation to create a pretty moving piece of work.
The hook of the album is the gang vocals. Nearly every lyric is sung as a group, frequently by the entire four piece. This choice lends the music a unique kind of urgency and communal feeling, but might make the record feel a little flat for some listeners. It’s kind of an ironic tradeoff, as the gang shouts can at times wash out the vocal dynamics and rob the words of some of their emotional intensity. In fact, it is the moments where the gang drops out and a lyric is sung with a single voice that the record is at its most potently memorable. Where another band might punctuate a lyric with volume or their own gang shout, I Feel Fine creates emphasis through clarity.
The band’s sound is strongly influenced by a muscular brand of Midwest emo, featuring flowing guitar lines paired with an energetic and lyrical rhythm section. There aren’t verses or choruses as such, rather ebbs and flows of intensity and stress. Several songs (“Elemenohpea”, “The Ladder”, knockout closer “Fold”) are built around stop-start dynamic patterns, as the band moves from raucous heaviness to airy beauty several times within a single song. This approach isn’t groundbreaking for the genre, but I Feel Fine executes it extremely well. If the band had less developed senses of dynamics, arrangement, and melody, the record would drag. Luckily they are usually right on the money. There are moments of real tenderness on
The Cold In Every Shelter too, most notably the lovely acoustic track “Where The Clouds End”. On this song, the gang vocals feel more like a rustic choir than a shared shout of angst. It’s a welcome change of pace and a highlight of the record.
The lyrics on
The Cold In Every Shelter are strong. The songs are largely concerned with self-imposed isolation and the dissolution of relationships. The record starts by asking “Why do we hide ourselves?”, and follows this question to its logical endpoints: you begin to feel empty and alone (“I work to sit around/Just another skeleton cluttering the closet”) and people begin to fall away from you (“Two heads stopped talking today”). They frequently rely on aphorisms (“We always know more of our monsters than ourselves” is my favorite), but when combined with the gang vocals, the aphorisms feel urgent and particularly true.
And that’s the real appeal of the album I think. It’s concerned with universalizing feelings of loneliness, turning difficult inner lives into something less isolating. There might indeed be cold in every shelter, but you don’t have to shelter alone.
