Where Did You Come From?— The American Analog Set
#365Songs: February 15th
I love a good road trip. Hours of endless highway, the monotonous blur of passing lights and introspection. I’ve always preferred night driving, just me and the truckers, a series of near death experiences in rain sleet snow wind. This love started in college on treks from Columbus to Cleveland and back again, and then afterwards from Cleveland to Boston and back. And then later, the cross country from Chicago to Colorado and back, and finally from Colorado to San Francisco. So often these trips took me from one place to another, but the journey was inward. Like running, a long drive is where I can settle into my solitude and stare down whatever buried thoughts ride alongside me.
Back in the Napster days, I accumulated a large quantity of bands ideal for these journeys — Explosions in the Sky, Tortoise, Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Album Leaf, Do Make Say Think. That late ’90s, early 2000’s post-rock era of math rock and shoegaze instrumentalists. I loved it, a lot, and though I listen less often now, it doesn’t take much to dig me back in. Oftentimes, it’s just a road trip.
Though most of my favorites back then were predominantly instrumental, a few balanced me out with a layer of vocals atop the overlapping guitars and emo-rage-y drum lines. I fell hard for bands like Sea and Cake, Galaxie 500, Broken Social Scene, but my go-to was often American Analog Set — to date, I am the only person I’ve ever seen sporting an AmAnSet t-shirt in public. A splash of krautrock, a pinch of post-rock, and a whole lot of lo-fi shoegaze, the band always hit me where it mattered. They soundtracked so many trips — short and long — for so many years.
And then they disappeared.
Until last year with the release For Forever, which felt like 18 years later they picked up where they left off.
And then last week, when they dropped an EP that felt like they’d made up for that lost time. The opening track is a 12-minute slow burn that feels like it could sit alongside Ry Cooder’s perfect Paris, Texas soundtrack–one of my favorite films of all time, which should serve as no surprise to anyone who has both seen it and knows me on any level.
What Are We Going to Tell Guy? is a slow burn, but I ask you to imagine yourself in a car moving fast through the desert as magic hour fades into night, as the tumbleweeds roll up under your wheels, as the lines in the road dance alongside you, as bugs splatter against the windshield, as your thoughts turn inward.
But it’s the album’s aptly-titled fourth song, Where Did You Come From?, that hits me with the nostalgia of trips past, when the band’s old sound merges with its new one, the way versions of ourselves sometimes meet in passing and leave us swerving for balance.
