- Welcome to Daytrotter
- Oh Hi
- Dead Oaks
- Thread
- School Friends
There’s a lot of patience in Now, Now songs, even when there shouldn’t be. There is a cool hand applied to these stories of youthful indecision and manipulative self-wanting. The songs that singer/guitarist Cacie Dalager, guitarist Jess Abbott and drummer Bradley Hale make are those that leave you smitten, but that was never the problem. You, much like many others, arrive at being smitten way too quickly and that’s mostly the problem for many of the characters that are found here. It’s a look or a smile, a partially obstructed glance that can flip the switch on an imagination that falls all over itself, composing a dream scenario between two people that couldn’t be any more unlikely than it is.
It’s friends thinking that they can make friends feel things that they never will – that steep uphill climb that usually results in sunken feelings and temporarily dreary living before the difficult move of pulling the plug on the relationship is made. Dalager sings of one such woman, who can’t get it through her head that she’s never going to make her friend feel anything different, even through intimacy, but she’s determined to keep trying and to keep overlooking the obvious. “You have a girlfriend, but she’s not your girlfriend/She’s just your friend/Through the night/You’ll have a new one in the morning/She’ll have really pretty eyes/She’ll be invisible/Like you want her/She’ll try to do everything just right for you/You have a girlfriend, but she’s not your girlfriend/You just like her, where she’s at,” she sings on “School Friends,” and it’s emblematic of the general feel that these pretty, somewhat down in the dumps songs give off.
They are coming of age songs that are loaded with the feverish neediness of life as unstable lovers, of people who are fighting for their next day, for the kiss or the encounter that’s going to mean something more. They are songs about being stuck in the middle, where most interactions either feel like a waste of time or a complete drag. Now, Now, from Minneapolis, navigate these hot tub waters and the lingering hands with a smart touch of wait and see, pulling the arms in close around the middle, keeping a clear eye to what’s really happening.