Structure and Emotion: a Deep Dive
So Many Dynamos is a hard band for me to describe. I’ve thought about them enough that it’s difficult to disconnect their music from my emotions. I can’t stand to praise them because of that, and that happens with just about every artist I love. Emperor X, for example, was and is unbelievably formative for me, but I can’t help but think it could all be better in some nebulous way. But it isn’t, and if it was “better”, it wouldn’t be the same music that I love. The same is true for SMD. Their flaws make them real, and they aren’t something to be embarrassed about. There’s no need to shower them with praise or lean on disingenuous irony. The gloves are coming off and a different set of cleaner, more honest gloves are coming on. We owe it to artists like these to look at them head-on, dissect what works and what doesn’t, and how it makes us feel.
There’s a certain roughness to SMD’s work that I find very cathartic. Many of their best tracks carry this feeling of bludgeoning push-and-shove impact or chaos. “Search Party” is the obvious posterchild of this style, very deliberately letting the instrumentals to do much of the storytelling. It does well at getting across a feeling of apocalyptic grandeur, but it almost feels too deliberate in its attempt. It’s too clean and calculated, and that’s generally my issue with Flashlights as a whole. Don’t misunderstand. Flashlights is still a great album, but there’s something about their earlier work in When I Explode and ¿Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era? that really satisfies the angsty teen in me. “Heat/Humidity” has these weighty snare-informed swings in momentum that, along with the guitar, create this feeling of an alarm-blaring panic. It’s fun and full of these bludgeoning instrumental impacts that really stick into my imagination. “Get Down” and “A State Without a Springfield” have a similar sort of weightiness, albeit in different ways. “Get Down” starts much slower than the other examples I’ve given, with a pace closer to some of their quieter songs like “These Things Happen” or “Seriously, Now”. It picks up from its pretty restrained introduction into something of an indie punk crowd-hype, and Stovall’s chants of “Get down, get down!” really make me wish I was back in a pit. Conversely, “A State Without a Springfield” is much lighter and more breakneck. Something to shout along to in your car while you’re on the interstate. It also has the same sort of swaying of “Heat/Humidity”, now being led by one of the guitarists instead of Kunstel’s drumming.
The Loud Wars is filled with this sort of high-energy track, with “Keep it Simple” being the most similar to their older work. “Friendarmy” is still probably the best song of the album, though. It carries this sense of marching, organized chaos that I struggle to find outside of Nine Inch Nails tracks like “March Of The Pigs” and “Getting Smaller”, albeit with a significantly slower pace than either of those tracks. Still, The Loud Wars generally lacks the same sort of push-and-shove energy shown in the other tracks I’ve highlighted here, once again trading it for a cleaner sound. Overall, these rough, weighty tracks really scratch an itch for me. They remind me of that warm August night of my first local show, crammed like sardines and getting shoved around in the pit in someone’s back yard. They bleed into my imagination, crashing, bludgeoning chaos sowing itself recursive. I love it.
Still, this is not their only style. Many of their songs instead take on a slower, more calculated arrangement, accentuating these complex and “math-y” movements in motion. Flashlights, The Loud Wars, and even Safe With Sound best represent this, with their experience making allowing them to clean up and focus their sound. “Inventing Gears” is a pleasant ride all the way through, steady loops of switch-turning signatures before switching gears (haha) and crash-rising into a noisy climax. It then settles down into a short interlude driven by both guitars, who sleepily whisper the song’s melody in farewell. SMD struggles with getting too cute for some of their tracks, but “Inventing Gears” manages to pull it off and make something sort of beautiful to cap off the track. “We Vibrate, We Do” leans closer to the chaotic style I previously mentioned but has a lot more time-switches than something like “A State Without a Springfield”. This lends it a more complex mouth-feel (ear-feel?) that really compliments the erratic and somewhat incoherent vocals. Safe With Sound is a total outlier compared to the rest of their work, but it has some glimmers of their old sound here and there. “Movement in the Motion”, for instance, captures the same sort of instrument-driven back-and-forth seen in “Heat/Humidity”, just with a much slower and lighter feel to it.
Moving back to The Loud Wars, “The Formula” is another great example of this style. Despite all of its chaos, it is ultimately more in line with the other “low-impact” tracks listed here. It puts a lot of focus on pacing, with different layers popping in and out as it slowly ebbs out before quickly building to the climax. It projects a sort of narrative structure onto not just the track itself, but to the album as a whole. It’s an incredible sendoff, but “Progress” is still my favorite example of the style. The narrative structure is even stronger here than in “The Formula”, with the lyrical focal point expanding outwards from militant microorganisms to skyscrapers spouting from the earth. There’s also a sort of desperation in Stovall’s cries of “We will get what we deserve”. While it could read as “might makes right” destiny-jargon, its use in “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning” earlier in the album instead contextualizes it as a comeuppance for past crimes. “Progress” is all about pointless mass destruction in order to destroy, build, and destroy for the sake of destroying, building, and destroying. What we deserve is to pay for what we’ve done, to have our structures collapse underneath our feet and drag us down with them. It evokes the late-capitalist frustrations of the past few decades perfectly, all mirrored by the track’s structure. Simple elements building in complexity before they scream and collapse under their own weight, structures dissolving in clashing shouts. Movements in motion.
I’ve been saying a lot of nice things about SMD so far. I do truly love this band and the art they’ve made, but it wouldn’t be fair of me to simply drown them in praise. Like any band, they get things wrong sometimes. Safe With Sound as a whole just feels mediocre. There isn’t any particular track of verse that stands out to me as terrible, but that’s part of the problem. The tone of both Stovall and the composition as a whole is more or less uniform throughout. The same synths and claps over and over again, eroding the mind. Any differences between individual tracks average out into a single blob of sound. It makes criticism nigh impossible, and that’s infuriating. With the rest of their discography, regardless of it’s quality, there’s something to say about it, but Safe With Sound manages to evade any and all criticism by hitting a critical mass of mediocrity. Mid aside, even their good albums have some misses. The previously mentioned “Keep It Simple” off of The Loud Wars ends up a little too true to its name. The same ring-tone riff repeating endlessly gets old fast, even if it’s clever.
The Loud Wars as a whole has this sort of issue. There’s plenty of self-reference and fun verses to go around, but SMD leans on them way too hard. “The Novelty of Haunting” is probably my favorite of any of their narratives. It’s a really touching piece that, to me, represents the futility and loneliness that suicide brings. It’s an encouragement to live. To not forfeit your life to the bottom of a lake. To love your friends while you have them. However, that’s all a little soured by the song’s execution. “I think your demons need some exorcise”, the chorus’s only verse, is granted way too much space. A single line repeating eight separate times throughout the track is exhausting, not to mention the line itself just isn’t strong enough to warrant so much real estate. It’s a little cute, sure, but it isn’t really contributing much to the song’s narrative. “Edgeless”, a track by personal favorite (and tour-buddy of SMD) Emperor X, repeats the same line twenty-five whole times and makes it work. How? Because the line ties into the track’s themes. The whole point of the track is that the line repeats so much. It’s given one big chunk of space to breathe, and the constant back-to-back delivery of the same verse organically strains his voice to the point of mania. It works just about perfectly. “The Novelty and Haunting” can’t do that. The song isn’t about the single verse, but they give it so much space that it feels like it should be. It just doesn't work and that sucks and I’m a little mad about it because I love the song otherwise.
I feel similarly mixed with When I Explode. I love what this album is doing. It’s rough and playful and angsty and it tickles the angry teen part of my brain just right. But man, I’m really glad they improved so much for Flashlights. Some of this is rough in a real bad way. Stovall’s vocals are a little all over the place. He does well in “Windows Facing Walls” and “These Things Happen”, but tracks like “The Pros of Being a Con Artist” (which should be called “The Pros of Being a Con” but whatever) struggle. Aside from a dithering composition and a guitar hook lacking a sinker, Stovall feels especially strained and nasally here. His delivery in the track’s big climactic payoff has barely enough energy to register above baseline. The lows are really low with him, but he does improve in time for Flashlights.
I love So Many Dynamos, and I can’t stand it. They aren’t the most important or skilled band in the world. Barely anybody talks about them. They’re pretty terrible live. Their first album is uncomfortably close to Emergency & I right down to the topics and structure. Safe With Sound sucks. There’s plenty wrong with them, but it’s only because of what they do wrong that I can even say anything about them. I struggle to find anything to say about so many of my favorite bands because they lack that dissonance. They don’t make me ask myself any “what if”s or “if only”s, but the Dynamos do, and they feel special to me because of that. They spark a dormant passion in me like few others can, and it’s a damn shame they left us so soon.