It's a crazy feeling when a song makes your world stop on its axis. Like a spinning globe that someone had put the brakes on by gouging their thumb into it. This will happen to me sometimes. The general muddle of thoughts that have been swirling around my head is given cause to coalesce around a single phrase in a song, or even just a riff, or even a drum pattern. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how flat the world has seemed as of late. How there are so many explanations for the whys and hows of the present state of the world, and the effect of each dispensation de jure is to transform all of history, geography, and culture into some kind of cardboard Kabuki sideshow that serves to justify the narrator of each unified theory in their current, self-aggrandized course of action. And while these glaring, hot iron theses do a fair job of smoothing over objections and vindicating the moment, they also form a rationale for a lack of action, seemingly motivated by an attempt to run down the clock until there is no chance that any action, once elected, could achieve its desired effect. Like a needle in the groove of a record, everyone is just in their lane until the music stops. The catalyst and lightening attracting object of this point of clarity is a line from Boston group Twen's latest album and its title track, One Stop Shop. It goes, "Feeling like there's one short shot / For a fading revolution / There's always time" ... until there isn't. That's how the song ends. The last line is, "There isn't always time." The song has this sad kind of marry-go-round quality to it... it rotates too quickly and you can sense it straining against its own weight to continue each cycle, but somehow completing another and the next without collapse, although you know it is coming... that great shadow of dread looming in the corner of your eye warns as much as the harmonies lift and lower and you feel a tingling in your stomach and chest as your guts get draped around your lungs and thumping heart as you ride the wave of vocalist Jane Fitzsimmons melancholy warble. And then the music stops and the curtain drops and that's it. One Stop Shop is a little like Twen's tribute to the last forty years of rock history and culture, but even then, the title implies that you don't need to reference another collection of work to get up to speed, or appreciate what came before this record rolled off the presses. It's the final, full compendium of Western musical craft, with no prologue or epilogue. It is wholly contained, and its grooves are infante... until they're not. The assution of the title is of course farcical. There is no way that any one work could be so all-encompassing, consuming, and dominant that you'd never have to go outside of it to make sense of it or the conditions of the world that begot it. Although, the Nashville by way of Liverpool psychedelic dip of "HaHaHome," the thorn-lined Brit-pop wilt and dazzling Lynott guitar light-ups of "Dignitary Life," the bawdy blues pop of the fleshy kick-back curb-tapping soul of "Automation" with its funk-filled ballast buoyant energy, and the dusky green glance swept, crawl until you fall, escalatingly and hungry pop-soul knife-twist of "Fortune 500," taken all together, make a solid aesthetic case for staying put and wallowing in their neo-nostalgic near-sublimity until you sink and dissolve in their welcoming harmonic murk. Nothing can satisfy all of your human needs though, whether it be the demand for love, meaning, or belonging; there is no one idea, place, or person who can be the source of all the things that will sustain you. The funny little farce lurking within and buried beneath the floorboards of One Stop Shop, but whose righteous heart you can still hear beating in the well of your ears, is the revelation that the more any one thing tries to sell you on its absolute and undeniable necessity, the more bankrupt and empty it will clearly be shown to be. That's not to say that, one thing, even an album, even a great album, can't give you a lot... but it can't give you everything. One stop shopping is the myth that prolongs a dying world.
