Drums For Clowns and Kit Cooper’s ‘Grave Concern‘ sounds like several consecutive all-nighters. In the morning, instead of feeling the relief that exhaustion usually affords, your mind convenes a high-alert, totally unrequested all-hands meeting where nobody feels prepared for any of it.
The song is frantic, angry, emtionally obsessive; the kind of track that doesn’t have a lot to contribute to your basket of flowers and well-wishes. Rather, “Grave Concern” is tense, atmospheric and full of emotional restlessness, the kind of thing that doesn’t even bother pretending some things can just be explained away and tidied up. With so many songs about feeling lonely or going through tough times often winding themselves into inspirational power ballads with an uplift hidden beneath the weight of hardship, it was refreshing to find that the band is much less interested in neat or inspirational resolutions. This track simply sits with the discomfort; it does not make a move to transcend the uncomfortable by explaining what lies beneath it.
Their guitars build the energy and drama of the song without ever seeming to attempt a total sonic reinventing purely for the sake of relatability.
They are experienced. They sound confident in what they’ve put together and especially confident with presenting the bleak truthfulness that makes a great track so gripping. They’ve found a sound with their guitars that vacillates from tense atmosphere to a sweeping solo that builds with force all the while their drumming powers the song with their anxious energy throughout.
There is something really cinematic in their arrangements without it sounding like a movie trailer company has just discovered what Sad™ is. There’s an intimacy there that you’re rarely in awe of- it feels like the particular type of darkness that comes with not being able to stop thinking. The singer isn’t so much delivering a carefully prepared statement on suffering as much as what it feels like to actively struggle.
The line about “the things people carry that the world never sees” is certainly not trying to offer a lecture but actually feels quite relatable to the point of just really giving listeners the impression that somebody’s being really honest right now.
It does come as a surprise though that the song is able to somehow be really sad but not exhausting at the same time. It sits with discomfort and sadness but it does so without dwelling nor offering fake encouragements with fake positivity. Instead, any hint of anything positive in this piece feels tentative rather than expected and this makes it all the more convincing than any cheap attempt at a happy ending.
Grave Concern is dreary, restless, but also strangely beautiful and perhaps there’s nothing more to ask from what we’re given.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
