by Taylor Ruckle (@TaylorRuckle)
With its scrambled noise guitar licks, delirious, driving beats, and lyrics built on a grim sense of irony, Just Look At That Sky --the sophomore full-length from Chicago quartet Ganser-- is the sound of summer. Maybe not in the traditional sense of friendly fun in the sun, but as it builds on their penchant for dark, pulsing atmospherics and razor-sharp attitude, it captures the feel of a summer under lockdown and a post-punk band at their most dialed-in.
Co-lead singer Nadia Garofalo sets the tone in her unhinged, sneering shouts on album opener “Lucky.” Meanwhile, co-lead singer/bassist Alicia Gaines, guitarist Charlie Landsman, and drummer Brian Cundiff lay down one of the album’s most abrasively catchy instrumentals. It’s a sarcastic stare-down with self-destructive tendencies and self-reflected rage -- bitter disappointment in yourself for not being better than you are.
Everyday always-online life already amplifies that problem, as they explore in “Bad Form,” where they lament the sickening exhaustion of electronic overexposure. It’s worth noting the album was recorded roughly a year ago, but it hits particularly hard under pandemic conditions, where there’s no escape from the reflection in your computer screen. The production --a team effort by the band along with past collaborators Brian Fox and Mia Clarke-- renders that dissociative turmoil in rich, varied detail throughout the record. Sometimes it’s front and center in rumbling tom rolls and tremolo strumming. Other times, it’s more creeping and ominous, in touches of minimalist piano and other such tasteful art-rock embellishments.
So what about the outside world? Even pre-COVID, it was easy to see it as “a climate of catastrophes that’ll never get better”--a lyric so bluntly apropos for 2020 that it now features on Ganser’s t-shirts. That line comes from “Projector,” where self-assured, pseudo-intellectual pessimism becomes a target ripe for the band’s skewering. At one point, Garofalo declares in mock-confidence, “Let’s recite our theories and how we’d known so much better,” only to be answered by a squealing, spiraling outburst of guitar.
That wry humor is a core part of Ganser, as entwined as Gaines’ relentless bass lines. In past interviews, the band has talked about the importance of not taking themselves too seriously. At the same time, they comment on the fraught relationship between humor and suffering. “[NO YES]” (an inversion of “YES NO” from Odd Talk) samples dialog from a 1959 medical film about clinical depression, pairing it with calm, reflective guitar and synth shimmer. In it, a patient explains that he always kept up his habit of making others laugh, even at his own lowest point. He goes on to compare the feeling of depression to an old saying about the afterlife: “The worst part about hell is not the flames. It’s the hopelessness.”
Just Look At That Sky isn’t about overcoming the hopelessness as much as it’s about those moments of waking up in flames and going on with a smirk, or a sigh, or a scream. It happens internally, as in “Emergency Equipment and Exits,” with its sky-high keys and desperate, sprinting drums, where Gaines reaches for the fire alarm at a party in her own honor. It happens on a grander scale, as in the brassy, swaggering groove of “Bags For Life,” where, yes, the world is plenty disappointing too. Yet the music goes on, taking sometimes-gruesome stock of those moments, and in Ganser’s case, the sound is only getting tighter and more essential.