DBA! - 'Falling Out'
Merseyside alt-rockers DBA! return take a different approach on new single Falling Out.
After the major-key sunny vibes of their last single A Poet And A Clown, Falling Out is a starkly different take on DBA!’s crunchy powerchord-based style. It starts calmly enough, singer Sam Warren’s opening verse coming with all the sore-throated lethargy of the morning after a very bad night. The opening lines are plaintatively gruesome - “Did you cut it out? Feel the soft bone on my head/Pull it out if you feel that you want to” - words which fit the scratchy stripped-back bass and drums. Once the full band sound drops in, Falling Out begins it’s characteristic lurching pulse, and never lets up.
There’s a lot of momentary silence in Falling Out, a textural element which offers about a dozen different drops and scene-shifts in the song’s four minutes. DBA! say more with these pauses than when they’re at full pelt, employing the spirit of DIY minimalism with a vibrant punk rock edge. These speaker-shredding guitar sounds are immense, like the band are two feet away. DBA! have named a host of 90s alt rock groups as their core inspiration, and that’s evident in their musical sensibilities, but their sound is not a million miles (musically and geographically) from the contemporary post-punk-and-poets scene in Dublin.
While those bands may choose more literary subjects for their work, DBA! plunge inward to express those feelings of being trapped in a situation you know is bad for you, but for one reason or another, you just can’t shake. The lyrics are raw with anguish, Warren choosing shortened phrases over long stanzas to illustrate his despondency. When your chorus is as evocatively bloody as “Falling out, peel my own skin/Falling out, I don’t want to” I guess you don’t need to say much more.
With repeated and similar phrases, and a varying structure, Falling Out is disorienting to listen to, a musical representation of being unhappy and unwell. There’s a lot of pain at it’s heart, but let the words simmer a little and they are about releasing yourself as much as anything else - It’s a song written from the other side of the crisis, after the fact. These situations usually feel endless or impossible to overcome. When you’re in the thick of it, you’re not thinking it’ll get better, you’re just surviving. Falling Out is a low-tempo, headachey track that encapsulates the excoriated desolation of a failing relationship. Its grungy wailing sounds offer solidarity to anyone still in the midst of a storm.
Words by Adam Davidson
