by Alex Reindl (@oldjoychicago)
There’s a lot to take in from Stoned, Beethoven Blasting, the new record by Sonny Falls, Chicago’s answer to Built to Spill. Fronted by songwriter Hoagie Ensley, Sonny Falls has a rotating cast of musicians bringing Hoagie’s very human tales of working class disaffection and resignation to life. With each new record comes a new incarnation of the band, and the latest offering which was released on 4/20 (was it just a coincidence?) on Forged Artifact Records sees the songwriting pared down to the essentials: a vibrant three piece where each instrument can fully occupy its requisite sonic space. Everything about the album is big: the hooks are huge, the guitar sound fills a void you never knew you had, the lyrics approach big ideas from small kernels of truth, and it’s held together by a rhythm section put together specifically for the album with Dave Satterwhite on drums and Ryan Smith on bass. With a run time of about twenty minutes the record hits you fast, with Hoagie packing more words into a three minute song than many dream pop bands fit in an entire album.
Speaking of words, Hoagie has a lot to say. Never has blue collar insecurity sounded so confident, and never have the words “Will I be fifty working at this pizza place? Smoking hitters when I take out the trash, scribbling out track listings” been sung so un-ironically to such a pretty guitar line. The last song “Dead Behind Dantes,” about Hoagie’s time working at a hell-themed pizzeria in Chicago, is a painfully relatable and elegiac ode to the depreciating value of dying dreams, and though it starts off simple and acoustic it quickly spirals into delicious fuzz while the same insecurities continue plaguing the narrator as he relates the story of a man dying in the street near the pizza place: “I haven’t seen a crowd in weeks and now there’s dozens in the street,” he sings, almost painfully aware that a public death can draw more than many local bands on a Thursday night in the same neighborhood. As the fuzz fades away the opening riff of “Stairway to Heaven” can be heard, a meta joke within a joke in a song about working for a hell-themed pizza place. Maybe there is some light at the end of the tunnel, maybe there is a stairway to the good life at the end of all the work, but Hoagie knows that although hope springs eternal, the money to pay rent certainly doesn’t, and must be wrung out of every working day like the greasy towel in the back pocket of every food service industry worker in the city.
On another track he sings “if hell is other people then joy is outta luck,” coming back to the Sartre quote that started it all, following it up with “relief is a thief in waiting.” There is a lot of personification going on in the lyrics of this record, philosophical concepts and ideas are turned into characters in the song and then smashed against each other like Barbie dolls in some sadistic Sid-from-Toy-Story kids basement, and the results can be slightly overwhelming at times. You’re definitely not going to catch all the references and ideas in one listen, but you will catch the huge hooks and heavy rock ‘n’ roll going on here. The guitar playing is seemingly chaotic, but there is an underlying order that keeps the songs together and in the end nothing is more pleasant than when a series of squeals, squelches, and feedback swirls together into a harmonized guitar line and order is restored once again. This is a different kind of power-pop, and it’s engaging in a way that most of this genre isn’t.
You’re not going to find standard love songs on a Sonny Falls record, you’re not going to find songs about just driving around and having fun. There is an unrepentant realism in the lyrics of these pop song formats that may be obscured by personification at first, but in the end is made more ingeniously accessible and digestible because of it. “Happiness is a dog at my door, scratching to get inside. Seems simple just to give it at least a place to stay the night,” sings Hoagie on “House in my Head,” confronting the possibility that happiness can be an unwelcome guest to some, or a small creature to be trained and nurtured. There are heavy implications in many of the lyrics on the record, and as stated above there is a lot to take in here. Thankfully the music itself sounds great as well. This is an album that can be blasted from a car while you’re stoned (much like the title track suggests, although Beethoven this is not) as much as it can be intellectually dissected if you get a little too stoned at home while listening to it alone. It’s reminiscent of Built to Spill, in form and in function. Even Hoagie’s voice, a raspy, high tenor is much like Doug Martsch and the honest reflections on life and work are there as well.
Indie rock has gotten to a point of over-saturation in the extreme, but one of the best effects of that is there is always something new to find. Not everything is original, and not everything is genuine, but it’s that much more satisfying when you come across something that is. Sonny Falls doesn’t sound like anything else, and although it can be indirectly compared to many different artists, it is in its core something original. There is an earnestness here that can not be replicated, and there is an originality that cannot be duplicated or even compared to. This is music that comes from a place that cannot be faked, and although I’m sure plenty of thought went into the record it seems incredibly natural. Here are seven proud songs about insecurity, honest without being confessional, and catchy without being monotonous. It’s an album that’s as thought provoking as it is rockin’, and that begs the question: how rockin’ is it? The answer is yes.