The Savings and Loan – Today I Need Light
(2011; Song, By Toad)
Scotland’s The Savings and Loan serve a heavy duty blend of dour drunkenness, religious dread, and spartan arrangements on their debut, Today I Need Light. Stark and intimate like vintage Leonard Cohen setting Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape to music, Today I Need Light is refreshingly free of the brand of self-satisfied sentimentalism often found in downtempo acoustic folk pop. On the opening track, “Swallows,” the band strums a sparse dirge, borrows part of a lyric from Dylan’s “If You See Her, Say Hello” (“Sun down, orange moon . . .”), and sets a bleak, weighty tone for the rest of the album. The gripping “Catholic Boys in the Rain” is a dire cowboy song, exuding some kind of terrible realization blunted by resignation, like Mickey Rourke’s character riding the elevator down at the end of Angel Heart. “Pale Water,” included on Ball of Wax volume 23, layers electric guitar drone beneath lines like “We came for the ruins/We stayed for the sun and the water.” “The Star of County Down” borrows the frame of an Irish folk song (coincidentally played by Cahalen Morrison and Eli West as “Kingsfold” on that same volume of Ball of Wax) then lures that form away from the comfort of a pub or a campfire down into a fierce den filled with all sorts of feverish anxiety. Only the final minute of “Her Window” offers the listener any emotional quarter, with a pretty, major chord refrain of “I know just as well as you/That we both got work to do” atop strings, piano, tambourine and acoustic guitar.
If the term “chillwave” can be bandied about with impunity across the interwebs, allow me to resurrect the term “sadcore” from the cemetery of 90’s indie sub-genres and apply it to Today I Need Light. Unlike the restless heartsickness of artists like Galaxie 500, Eliott Smith or Bedhead, the Savings and Loan’s brand of sadcore is sad not because its creators are misunderstood or unappreciated by a girl or misfits in the world – any such uncertainty or anticipation has long since been stripped away. Today I Need Light is sad because of its knowledge that man is crippled by the infinite, that time takes no prisoners and that language is the only sad, feeble instrument we have in our doomed defense against the void. That’s an awful lot to ask from your pop music but the Savings and Loan seem up for the task, somehow making the whole experience compelling and enjoyable.
Buy Tonight I Need Light from the fine folks at Song, By Toad Records.