Snow Villain are the next band to enter your speakers and stay there for awhile. EP 1 is a wonderful culmination of imaginative songs protruding into a combo raw, folk raw. The opener of the release is “I Don’t Know,” a gritty track that really shines through its distinctive groove. The raw feel escalates into a head nodding experience lead by a powerful drum pattern and a flutter of guitars and bass. “Torches” is woven with an umbrella of melodies, transforming into an inspired sputter of vocals. Everything on EP 1 is calculated and layered, making it full of interesting surprises for every listen.
New Noise Magazine is pleased to bring forth a track by track of the release from the brain behind Snow Villain, Grant Goldsworthy.
1. I Don’t Know – If you’re lucky enough & aware enough to recognize it, there will be people who enter your life, and have such a profound effect on you’re perspective, they’ll make you feel like you’ve been “so naive” you’re entire life – making you think, “I was so dumb.” Sometimes you can spot it when it’s happening, and learn from it, and sometimes you realize an individual’s importance in retrospect, after a break up, or after experiencing the death of someone close to you. I Don’t Know explores the struggle of rebuilding your identity after the loss of someone really special. Not knowing who you are is a scary place to live.
2. Little Dogs – Wow… Where to begin with this one… This was one that came out of a live jam during a practice. We were working the verse melody & what we then assumed to be the chorus melody over & over & the lyric “always end up back where I started” came out of my head, and we kind of rolled with it. This song is about being & feeling “stuck,” at it’s core & it’s verse’s talk about different life path’s that seem inevitably to wind up with people feeling stuck, in cyclically-depressing way (to us).
3. Records – On the surface, this reads as a break-up song; lamenting the loss of a loved one. While that’s certainly a big part of what this song is about, it’s really about the specific experience when individual’s correlate memories to tangible, inanimate objects; in this case, records that were left behind after a romantic break up, and how you view these objects differently if the relationship changes. I am really happy with how this one ended up sounding on record. Everyone really “showed up,” and nailed their performances. We got heavy into using vocal effects on on sung-melody’s to make it our own instrument in a way – like from a keyboard pad or something…
4. Authors – Author’s is a fun song to play. It’s jammy, and dynamic, and we have fun with it. It’s certainly the most nuanced song, as it’s conceptual in spirit. This one is really a nod to great storytellers – a few of my favorite authors writing about topics poignant to the world today. We actually had five verses of this one, and really had to struggle who we narrowed it down to, but I’m glad this one came together as it did. Writing a song is a lot like telling stories. There’s just a lot to learn from their work….
5. Torches – This one’s wild… ha.. Drips in nostalgic, teenage-angst about government revolts, fighting fascism, the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, the inflating cost of health care, the influence of Big Banks, and basically about all forms of systemic, aggregate governmental injustice. This one is absolutely supposed to be comically over the top, but people are “comically over the top” about some of these issues, and some even have good reason to be….It’s a very satisfying one to sing. When in Rome, I suppose….
6. It Goes On – It Goes On is about confirmation bias, and the way we all go along with things because we’ve been conditioned to believe them, versus analyzing precedents & perspectives & making our own decisions. It’s so easy to live the prescribed life America is chewing up & spitting out. Too easy.
