More Hazards More Heroes
Daytrotter Session - Feb 8, 2012
- Welcome to Daytrotter
- The Good Kind
- Romans
- Cleansing
- Shittiest Folk Bands
Dyin’ Ain’t For Death is the title of Nashville duo More Hazards More Heroes debut album and it’s not just a phrase that sounded catchy and would look good on a vinyl jacket. It seems to mean something very serious to Drew Lorimer Jr. and Brent Shaffer, something that maybe even they have not been able to put a direct finger on just yet. They know that it means something deeper to them and they’re getting there, getting closer to arriving at a conclusion that will satisfy them. Birth and death, gravesites and homes all share the same blanket and drink out of the same cup for these two men. They’re able to distinguish them apart, but one gets the feeling that sometimes they’d rather not do that and there’s no telling why that may be. It could just be that they enjoy confusing birth for death and home for a final resting place. It creates these weird and interesting conundrums in their heads and gives them all kinds of challenges and needs to explain. They scream the reminder that we’re all just people on very finite paths, our passage never takes us from living to more living, but always to an infinite – or at the least unpredictable – death. It could be one that involves the least lit eternity that we’ll never have to encounter cause that’s all, or something that’s never been reported back to any of the remaining living, because that would ruin all of the surprise. Here’s guessing that if that’s what it’s going to be like – that there is something to shoot for – that it couldn’t possibly be what we think it is. Here’s betting we’ll all be a little disappointed when we get to that and ain’t that a shitty way to start off in a new place? Lorimer Jr. and Shaffer give us these lines from “The Good Kind,” “Our God is a sound one/Yeah he might give a little kick and push/Then go hide right by in that thicket brush/How that thicket hush/Naw, he ain’t there everytime I call/He as shy as a newborn boy/Just as shy as a newborn boy/Screamin’ loud like a hawthorne flower/Think you can?/You can’t ignore/No not at all,” and that to us sounds like the God they’re presenting is one of a prankster, someone that you’ve got to look out for. It seems that the characters in most More Hazards More Heroes songs are doing just that, unsure about what they’re being held accountable for or where the best light, or THEE, or thine light may be coming from. They focus on the sweetness of getting to struggle through the days, seeing that it was all worth it with a little reflection and some distance from the freshness. They focus on it all being a part of what this means, what it means to be scared shitless to bring life into the world and what it means to be scared shitless to have it taken away. Love is treated the way it should be treated, with utter amazement and with reverence, as they do in singing, “I got a bag of tobacco I need your flame I need a light,” living for it and all the while knowing that the cigarette burns out fast. It all just needs to amount to something coming out of it. It could just be that the greatest dignity is when you’ve accepted all of your shame and your fuck-ups, looked at them and smiled because it was all you could do. All of it is complete. And that’s when you hear the line, “Don’t cower in your final hour/You old face/Don’t cower in your final hour/Hold face/Red-stained, windburnt soul/Return to base.”