Album Review: Spanish Love Songs - 'Brave Faces Everyone'
Brave Faces Everyone, the third full-length release from LA punk quintet Spanish Love Songs, has one thing to say: you might be hurting, but you’re not alone.
Calling this album punk would be a discredit to the sheer brilliance of the ten songs featured throughout; it would edge the album away from the limelight and into just another release hanging from the genre umbrella. And that would be cruel. From the outset, lead singer Dylan Slocum’s desperation tinged vocals plead — sometimes full of hope, as he asks “it can’t be this bleak forever?” into the void at the end of “Self-Destruction (as a career choice)”, or the imploring “Dolores”; sometimes hidden in what can only be described as self-loathing, as in “Routine Pain”, and sometimes in cathartic anger, as with both “Generation Love” and “Kick” — over rousing guitar riffs, pounding drums and surprisingly melodic harmonies. Each song is ordered chaos, with each element adding its own inspired musical bursts, and it somehow still ends up producing ten intrinsically unique songs.
Opener “Routine Pain”, for instance, starts almost acoustic, relying simply on the lyrics and harmonies to carry the track. Even when it takes off, it somehow hangs onto that lyrical dependence; and that’s what makes the album brilliant. Like Manchester Orchestra, or Trophy Eyes for instance, the band is based primarily in the lyrical truth. Character stories, depicting suicide, and addiction, and debt, and death, and everything else.
But it’s on songs like “Optimism (as a radical life choice)” as he screams “don’t take me out back and shoot me/ I know my circuits are faulty/ but I’ve only ever been a kid”, where the band explore both the ongoing mental health epidemics sweeping across the world, with a lack of help, as well as (if loosely) the now somehow blasé subject of school shootings and the atrocities that precede and inspire them, that Brave Faces Everyone shines. It’s when the tracks are full of barely contained rage, and anguish, and fury, that the album comes into its own.
“I feel like burning down my life again/ I watch the fire spread over my skin”, he admits on the title track closer Brave Faces, Everyone; but rather than wallowing in sadness, or nihilism, or cynicism, like the lyrics suggest, the songs seem to break through the pessimism, the despair. “We were never broken/ life’s just very long.” Much like how life never suddenly breaks down — rather, it’s a long, step by step process that snowballs into your own nadir — Brave Faces Everyone shows that, in the same way, the climb out of that pit starts with the first step.
“Am I going to be this down forever?” he asks at the start of the album. By the end, Spanish Love Songs strives to answer that unfortunately widespread question, as people suffer from and for a myriad of reasons. Ultimately, that’s an impossible task. But what the LA quintet do is offer a doorway into your own thoughts, to explore your own internal thoughts, and, hopefully, let you answer it for yourself.
The fact that they do this through a brilliant album is just a nice coincidence.
Words by James O’Sullivan