Review Summary: waking up in someone else's garage
In The Districts’ Take Away Show for La Blogotheque, Rob Grote looks vaguely concerned as he ambles down a nondescript pathway in Paris; acoustic guitar in hand, wind in hair. The camera is shaky but entirely focused on his profile -- you can see the moments that require more of his focus as he crumples up his expression, and the rickety cinematography evinces discomfort, uncertainty even, as the frontman capitulates once more to the place from which the song was born. The pre-chorus, though, is what makes this session special. As the camera pulls back to reveal the band, the song coyly unfurls – a steady rhythm section poised and ready to catch Grote as he falls to his knees during the chorus.
“It’s the distance between us worth a thousand diamond rings” he laments, to someone who’s too far away to hear him. Dusting himself off, he stands up again, noticeably without a straight back.
Popular Manipulations works on a similar system: angst assuaged by company, happiness passed around a campfire until there’s a modicum of silence and insecurities return to reclaim the frontline. It’s a relief, then, that this record is sufficiently fuzzed-out – swirling around a thicket of sandpaper guitars and watertight basslines. I think the bedlam is a defence mechanism, because every precipitous, end-of-the-rope lyric (
“Am I all alone?”) is balanced-out and beautifully undermined by an immediate about-face (
“No, I’m just a narcissist”), and forced underwater by Grote’s sardonic delivery. And so it continues to pivot: ignoring difficult questions until they become so pressing, so deeply antagonistic, that they can only be answered once they’ve collapsed under the debris that The Districts manage to conjure.
Because this is a record about desperation and people who are terrified of loneliness: mothers, friends, predetermined victims, the self. It’s about rattling your cage until either someone comes along with the key or you realise you have to break out yourself.
Fat Kiddo -- string buzz, languid forward moment et al -- could just as easily be about a bad day as it could be about death. Grote sings the titular phrase the same way he intones
“laugh and watch the retard dance” in
Suburban Smell – to emphasise just how visceral and, more importantly, affecting the blasé treatment of such a phrase can be. It’s why he captures the fear so well; he lives in it, but he’s willing to be someone else’s stepping stone.
It’s also a small-town album coming to terms with the city -- overwhelmed and so it is overwhelming in return. Grote yelps
“the point is beside the point now” in Point as if he’s lost in the vastness. But despite telling us he knows
“in [his] heart” that it’s the truth, his taut and shaking vocal delivery proves that he’s still searching for meaning. That’s why, I think,
Popular Manipulations is tethered to a sense of optimism. It’s this search for a “point” that makes lines like
“engines fail, my dear” seem more consoling than acquiescent; the record more hopeful than terrified.
I think this record is destined to be both important and criminally overlooked. It says things it doesn’t mean (
“too blessed to be depressed, thank Jesus”) on its way to finding meaning. It drops one-liners and then gasps as if it just shouted at the wrong stranger. It’s every album you’ve ever heard walking past someone’s garage, and it’s deeply and regrettably human. But the band plays on: sometimes just outside of frame, but always listening as their eternally relatable frontman, shaking like a handheld camera, struggles both with himself and against himself. Listen to it – you’ll understand what I mean.
More importantly, you’ll understand what The Districts mean, and isn’t that
the point?
