Review Summary: Let it go.
It’s impossible not to hear Stay Inside’s debut LP
Viewing in the context of this novel coronavirus. Not only because it was released while most of the world is, well, staying inside, but also because the album reaches for the sort of swirling emotional catharsis we might all long for right now: some gnarled release of anger, resentment, grief, and grace-tinged resignation.
Viewing wraps you in this catharsis over and again. The alarm-like breakdown of “Void”, the gorgeous final minute of “Revisionist”, the dizzying light of “Divide” - all of these create a record that balances every part of how it feels to be tired-of-it-all.
It helps that the band sounds very good together. They might not share the absolute cohesion of a group like Big Thief, but Stay Inside’s attention to each member’s gifts never allows
Viewing to idle. Within the record are angled riffs, ragged bass lines, beautiful vocal harmonies, and pulsating drum fills, and at each moment you can almost see the band playing these songs live - making eye contact across a small stage, watching each other’s hands and nodding as if to say, “Go on now.” Their connectedness makes the cathartic release that much more tangible.
Comparisons could abound with
Viewing. At times, the album carries early Brand New vibes (closer “Leave”), and in other instances wouldn’t feel completely out of place alongside Thrice’s first two albums (“Silt”) or Balance and Composure’s
The Things We Think We’re Missing (“Revisionist”). Maybe, though, name-dropping sets unfair expectations. Because overall, Stay Inside earn their own identity thanks not to who they sound like but to what they’re chasing after. The whole record feels in pursuit or on the run - coiled like a sprinter in the blocks, and then set loose by a sound.
So what is it pursuing? Lyrically,
Viewing stays mostly abstract. For example, from “Silt”: “Twelve carbon flood, render it all down. / Smell it in the sun in the hot summer months.” That’s not to say, however, that the lyrics here are opaque; not surprisingly, the record wrestles with broad themes of death, loss, and grief through an acutely personal lens. Imagery pulled from the earth (“I wash in your wake, float in my own filth, dig my heels into the silt”) saturates much of
Viewing, almost literally grounding the album and creating the context for Stay Inside’s search for catharsis. We’re all grave-tied, but can’t we still be free?
This ethos, and
Viewing as a whole, would still strike a chord were we not in the most uncertain moment in recent memory. But here we all are, and if David Kessler is right in his
Harvard Business Review interview, we’re tangled in an especially impalpable grief. Thankfully,
Viewing will help us move forward, even when it seems we can’t.
