The Best Soundtrack to COVID-19 Doesn’t Mention It At All
Spanish Love Songs’ third album Brave Faces Everyone is the album of 2020, in every sense. It ages better with every passing day
I hadn’t heard of Spanish Love Songs until late last year. They were announced as the support band for the Menzingers gig that myself and my best friend had bought tickets for as soon as it had gone on sale. I remember being slightly disappointed: I’d hoped that labelmates Off With Their Heads, who also released an album last autumn, would be joining the tour, but instead we got two bands I had not heard of before. The fans on chorus.fm were incredibly enthusiastic, though — the Americans were jealous that we got such a great line-up. Curious, I was told that I should listen to their latest single, Losers. It seemed almost poetic that Losers would go on to be their opening song on that night in February.
The mood of Losers is captured by its opening lines: “We’re going to waste our days getting outpriced of our apartments / Hoping we don’t go homeless, we sure as shit ain’t moving home”. The helplessness of watching as house prices, and consequently rents, rise inexorably, relying on the goodwill of others while trying to stay independent from our families, is familiar to anyone growing up in the 2010s. (The only difference here in the UK is we call them ‘flats’.) Wages have stayed stagnant as productivity and costs of living have increased, trapping many young people in cycles of debt — needing to save up money for expensive purchases whilst rationing out bills. House prices have risen steadily since the 1980s, taking them out of purchasing range for many young people; my grandfather has been known to joke that me and my siblings will only be able to afford a house when he passes away and we inherit — a fucked up sentiment for a fucked up time.
Another theme shown perfectly by Losers, and indeed throughout Brave Faces Everyone, is the condescending advice given to young people: “So many opinions on how we live / But there’s no option for even how to get out of bed” closes out the first verse of Losers, bringing to mind every myopic thinkpiece about avocado toast and entitled millenials killing industries, ignoring the financial realities they face in the era of private equity buyouts. Earlier in the album we get the outraged chorus of Generation Loss: “We’re just so fucking tired of explaining ourselves”; why, as singer Dylan Slocum wonders, “are you complaining / if they’re not listening?”. The same people attacking young people for being too selfish and too sensitive are the ones complaining about lockdown, screaming in the faces of doctors, begging for the right to force “the others” back to work for a cheap haircut. Often the social realities of quarantine are not new, but just exacerbations of existing tensions and inequalities.
This sentiment culminates, appropriately enough, in “Losers Pt. 2”, the thematic sequel. Slocum sings of losing his childhood home in the 2008 financial crash, and hoping to get it back once he graduated university (or college, as they say across the pond); he describes the financial precarity many young people (especially Americans) are forced into, reduced to begging not to get cancer or crash their car for fear of incurring unexpected bills. “The cost of living means the cost to stay alive” closes out the second verse, in one of the album’s many horrifying truisms; it reminds you that 40% of Americans lack the ability to cover a $400 emergency. The comfort comes in hearing someone else say it, in a shared sense of understanding. By the time the chorus kicks in — shouted out at the top of Slocum’s lungs — this builds to a cathartic release, a rallying cry for Generation Loss. At the time of release it felt powerful — now, after COVID-19 has kicked millions of people off their health insurance, and after even the Democratic Party have shut down universal healthcare, it feels truly inspiring.
“It’s the end of days / And we’re just hoping for the beach-front property” comes from the titular last single of the album, Beach Front Property. Guitarist Kyle McAulay, who also produced and engineered the record, shines here as the verses play over a quiet, reverberating guitar. This marks new sonic territory for the band, whose previous albums were very aggressive, and they take full advantage of the dynamic range it offers. Slocum plays the role of a wealth property developer wanting front row seats to the apocalypse, in contrast to his own finances “Got eight hundred dollars to my name / Not sure what it means / Trying to take these bastards for a quarter of a million”. It’s a powerful image of the rigged game that many of us face: desperate to put down roots, to have somewhere to live, but are met with a group talking about property portfolios, living and dying in a completely different world.
Spanish Love Songs weren’t to know what would happen in the months following the release of Brave Faces Everyone, but songs like Beach Front Property have aged like a fine Tweet. “I hate the rhythm of our lives these days” opens the second verse of the song, an ode to anxiety, the fear of going to a movie theatre without gun control while onlookers — in the song, given the form of thirty-somethings in a bar — don’t want to hear it, they want ‘nostalgia songs’, in much the same way that the great nations of the world have been swept up by a sheen of promised and impossible nostalgia, be it Brexit or Trump. The last line of the song’s bridge goes “Don’t believe in God / But figured he’d be a better planner than this”. It calls to mind the helplessness of being at the mercy not just of coronavirus, but also those who profess to act in the name of God — evangelical Christians in America, for instance, who wield disproportionate political power and bring it to bear against minorities and the vulnerable. When the times call for careful planning and compassion for one’s fellow man, a worrying number of people seem to take pleasure in the opposite, out of a misguided desire to return to a “normal” that was never just.
This is called back two songs later, with Optimism (As a Radical Life Choice). Again, anxiety is seen through the lens of guns: clear backpacks, an exit strategy in case someone fires a gunshot. But the feelings are universal: a tightening of the chest, the ever-present nature of exploitation living in a capitalist system, the way that money worries infiltrate every aspect of our everyday lives. The saying goes that “money can’t buy you happiness”, and it won’t save you from a gunshot wound, but it will save you a lot of tension; as Slocum puts it, “What would it take to be happy? I’d probably start with the money”. Then, before the breakdown Slocum calls out “I’m sinking / Won’t you sink with me? / We’re sinking”. The catharsis of hearing somebody say these words not just out loud, but proudly, serves to bind its listeners together in an act of compassion — sinking, yes, but sinking together.
It’s this that takes Brave Faces Everyone to the next level. Optimism’s title is itself a call-back to track 2, Self-Destruction (As A Sensible Career Choice). There, Slocum imagines hearing a loved one say “It won’t be this bleak forever” and replying, internally “Yeah right”. The start of the album talks about examining and ultimately destroying one’s self to build it up again; Optimism’s second verse sees Slocum declare “I’m done dying on the inside / now that everything is dying outside”. It takes courage to admit that things are not okay, that we are grieving for a dying planet and its dying people; it takes true strength to declare that in the face of everything you will stand up and be optimistic — to make the ‘radical life choice’ of the song’s title. We cannot pretend that everything is okay, we have to acknowledge the unfairness and the anxieties of life — but then the album goes one step further and urges us to use this newfound understanding to propel ourselves forward.
The title song is the final song on the record and it’s here that the band solidifies their move forward from their previous album, Schmaltz. (Schmaltz is by no means a bad album; it is a classic in its own right and one of the only albums I have ever listened to where I skip no tracks on a re-listen). From the “broken nose” that opens the song, a reference to Slocum’s wish to fix his nose in The Boy Considers His Haircut, through to the admission that he “woke up and didn’t feel better” (a double-whammy, referencing both Haircut and previous album closer Aloha to No-One), both these reminders of Schmaltz serve to show us that not everything has changed, that those insecurities still pervade Slocum’s life, much as they still persist in our own.
The difference lies in the conclusion: where Aloha to No-One was a paean to things never getting better, here the emphasis is on taking those next, painful steps, but emerging stronger for the experience. The chorus depicts a metaphor for self-destruction: “I feel like burning down my life again / … / until there’s nothing left but skeleton”. Conscious, though, of what can be done with that, Slocum posits a binding call: “If nothing gets better / it’s as bad as it seems / why can’t we say ‘fuck it!’? / you know it’s not what we need” before a bridge brings together highlights from the whole album. It’s a testament to the message of not just the song but the whole album: things are broken, things are completely and truly fucked, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t fix them. The only way to do that, though, is to take them on together — with a brave face. When we are far apart due to COVID-19, when we can’t gather in the same room, music is one cultural experience that can bind us together in shared experience, no matter where you hear the song. It’s a message that resonated that night in February, when those opening chords to Losers rang out and the words leapt from my lungs like I’d known them for years; it’s a message that resonates now every time I hear the closing notes of the album.
I could honestly gush about this album forever. I wish I could find room to praise the other members of the band: Meredith Van Woert’s keyboards, a true secret weapon in contributing to the album’s huge sound; Trevor Dietrich’s bass and backing vocals which anchor the album; Ruben Duarte’s drum fills which provide the backbone to every song and the weight to every breakdown, from the opening fills of Routine Pain to the closing moments of the title track. I want to praise Routine Pain, the opener which references an interview with Frightened Rabbit singer Scott Hutchison, and lead single Kick, a devastating set of stories about addiction, and Dolores, the slow number that follows Losers Part 2 and discusses collective grief in the aftermath of a mass shooting. Spanish Love Songs have packed so much into their 40 minutes — so many stories, so many truths — that there isn’t space to fit it all in here.
In a time of pandemic it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the world around us. Being stuck in your house is mentally draining by itself, let alone if you live with parents you dislike, or people you don’t know, a position that many young people find themselves in. It can feel like the entire world is trying to gaslight us, with the US president insisting that his country is top of the world in testing and the British government trying to get people back to work even though the chance of infection remains high. An album that sticks to the fundamental truth of the world — that things aren’t right, that we are permitted to suffer for the largesse of others — would be bold at any time. But at this moment in history, Spanish Love Songs’ Brave Faces Everyone goes further. It not only gives us a feeling of togetherness in shared trauma, but encourages us to fight back in unity, even with only the smallest of gestures. And right now, that’s what we really need to hear. Brave faces, everyone.
