Songs to reminisce to

Artist: volcano!
Song: Frozen In Escape (Spotify)
Album: Beautiful Seizure (Buy)

I remember the first time I heard volcano! a few years back. I was at a friends house on a summer afternoon listening to music on his computer between jamming and playing playstation, when his brother put on Apple or a Gun. It didnt hit me immediately, but something stuck with me, to the point I looked them up a few months later and bought their first album, Beautiful Seizure. I consider myself a relatively fickle person when it comes to music, and I can say that this is among only a handful of albums I've listened to fairly consitently since getting it, and I highly recommend you do the same. It's an album that definitely has its more immediate songs (Apple or a Gun, Easy Does It, Fire Fire) that I could all enthuse about for ages, but there were always tracks that eluded me until much recently. One of these was Frozen In Escape.

I'm not sure if it was something about me being much younger that lead to me never giving this song a proper chance, either skipping it on listens through the album or idly having it on in the background, but I know now that I was a fool. Maybe it was how slight it is, constituting only of Aaron With's piercing vocal and sparse guitar strums for the majority of the first half of the song. Maybe it was that it doesn't go far for the first 2/3rds of the song, relying on understatement to emphasise With's verses of longing for the past. I think I always appreciated the slightly chaotic ending to an extent, but it's not even half as affecting without 'getting' what precedes.

There's something about With's repeated croons of 'It's better there' that gets to me now where it didn't before. There's something affecting about that first guitar stab in the chorus and the way volcano! as a band seemingly effortlessly use the juxtaposition of loud and quiet to draw you so completely into a mood. It all makes me genuinely feel something now that I was stupidly oblivious to before. I'm not sure what that exact reason may have been, but I know now that my life would be much poorer without the music of volcano! and I urge you to give them the time and patience to become part of yours.