Slaughter Beach, Dog, the Philly based emo/indie band fronted by Modern Baseball’s Jake Ewald, released the first two singles to their upcoming album Safe and Also No Fear with One Down and The Good Ones. This is a band that has already changed a lot since its infancy and these two singles point towards more sonic development. SBD’s first album 2016’s Welcome, sounded more or less like lo-fi versions of Jake’s MoBo songs. The band followed it up with Motorcycle.jpg, a four song EP that took a folksier and more acoustic turn. Read SBD head’s favorite song there was 104 Degrees, and real reeeeeal heads will tell you that the 104 Degrees Demo is even better. However it was on their last album, Birdie, where the band truly found their sound and hit their stride, a post punk band with an emo edge. It was one of 2017’s most under appreciated albums, and songs like Gold and Green and Acolyte are beautiful in a way that makes me imagine them taking on a second life in a movie someday, soundtracking a couple falling into or out of love.
The first of the two singles, One Down, is an incredibly quiet and wistful indie-folk song, talking about how he likes to drive around and reminisce about how “the football team lit that football field on fire in ’99”. The album is being billed as a “Swerve into the darkness” by the band and One Down certainly bears that out. It is a nice, slow, sad haunt of a song that makes you feel the weight on your shoulders that age seems to bring Ewald, as since that football game “A hundred million years lit up and turned to dust”. The second song, Good Ones, is a more upbeat song with a much quicker tempo though the lyrics are on par with the first track, as the main character gets high on whippets and talks about how some times you just miss seeing the good ones, and how sometimes the good ones aren’t even as good as you remembered, licking his wounds with stars in his eyes. From the sound of it SDB will be going even darker with this next album, while continuing to progress further away from their pop punk/emo roots.
Preorder the new album HERE, and check out these singles at Spotify, Apple Music, or Bandcamp.
