- Welcome to Daytrotter
- Dashing In Passing
- Two Islands
We should maybe rethink what we’d like to hear in the songs that we hear when we go out to the bars and the clubs. It’s always nice to hear people rapping and singing about the copious amounts of alcohol and drugs that they’re going to get messed up on that night that will lead to all of their inhibitions getting tossed into the dirty gutter before you have your ID checked by a disinterested door guy and you get that first stamp of the night on the inside of your right wrist.
The songs that Liverpool band Outfit write seem as if they were meant for the clubs, but ones that are altered to meet the requirements of some gentler folks, not just those looking for an easy lay. These are people who need to hear that they’re worth their salt. They need pick-me-ups. They’ve got most of what they need, but they’re lacking in some general confidence and they’re very sure that they’re not the only ones. These aren’t songs about outsiders and their lonesomeness. These aren’t songs about dealing with a rubbish life and the nagging need to fit in, but knowing that there’s no place for them.
These two songs – the band’s first single “Two Islands,” and “Dashing In Passing” from their forthcoming ‘Another Night’s Dreams Reach Earth Again’ EP – unify the sentiment that there’s something slightly sad, but mostly gratifying in acknowledging that everyone just bonds over their imperfections and that everyone’s out there, mostly just waving in the breeze with fluttery confidence, but enough of it to get by, enough of it even to thrive on, if the odds move over to their favor. The characters that the lads in Outfit work into their songs are those who are torn between just staying home or bravely heading out for the evening, answering the pleas of their friends in the waiting vehicle outside their flat, ready to take them away to a night that will likely end up unmemorable, as most of them do. Lead singer, Andrew Hunt, sings, “I go out to find out who I am/I go out to find out who I’m not,” making the effort seem like a necessary one, something of a rite of passage and self-discovery. Then he gets out, through those doors and realizes, “I don’t know anyone else in here.” While that might be the point, it’s a bit dejecting and still, most everyone’s in there thinking the same damned thing, so fuck it all. “Habit haunts this quiet scene/But real life breaks come in-between/Until I die,” Hunt adds, and that’s what keeps many of us answering that call to the waiting vehicle, to those friends and those empty, rotten nights beseeching us.