Young Maths

Daytrotter Session - Jan 2, 2012

Young Maths – Daytrotter Session – Jan 2, 2012
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  1. Welcome to Daytrotter
  2. Hold Still Don’t Talk
  3. Latin Roots
  4. Fingered on The Dance Floor
  5. Truth Tables
  6. Sheets
  7. Errors

A lot of people have those situations where they feel as if they can still unwind them and backtrack to a place where it didn’t happen, where it looks and feels just as it did before the catastrophe. They feel that there are some things that can still be done to rectify the god awful mess that they created. There must be something that can be done to erase so much of what just happened. There’s a way to take some of it back — the worst and most damaging parts of it anyway. It’s too spooky of a thought that it cannot be undone. How is anything so bloody permanent that it can’t be fixed somehow, mended just a little bit, just enough to be able to move on and get the car pointed back in the preferred direction.

Much of what we’re taught by the McAllen, Texas, math rock band The Young Maths (appropriately enough) is that there are most definitely those points of no return that can and should be feared, not to mention respected. It seems that every song on the group’s two albums, “Thank You, Goodnight! We Are The Young Maths” and the latest, “Errorrs,” deals with a case of everything being too far gone to even get into it. It’s all gone to the shitty already. There is very little salvage value to any of the relationships that are smattered inside the stories. Everything got heated, boiling the hell over and there’s just nothing that anyone can do about any of it. It’s best to just dig a big mass grave for these relationships, push them all in and cover them with all those shovelfuls of cool, black soil. They have no heartbeats and they’re almost unrecognizable, they’ve been beaten up so badly.

Lead singer Robert Godinez has been circling the wagons of all these failed meetings and joinings for a long time. He’s worn rings around them, creating the worst agony on his own, with the continual punishment of thinking who she and the other she and the she before her are with now, what it would take to change all of that. The answer seems to always be that nothing will make any of it different and it turns him into a manic wreck, or at least his and his band’s music into manic wreckage. He longs for something simpler, something that he doesn’t have to think about, the easy leanings of it all just working out the right way — for him at least. The dance-y party-ness and the sentiment of “Fingered On The Dance Floor,” is a million miles away from the dance-y party-ness and sentiment of the Arctic Monkeys’ “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor,” though of some similar genus.

There’s an interesting thread of interchangability going on with a handful of songs, where girls and boys are seen as being replaceable, though the hurt and pain when any one particular boy or girl bails, is hard to take. Godinez wonders how many stupid girls he’d have to sleep with before he’d get bored, rendering none of it enjoyable, and then wonders, “How many of these boys does it take to replace me/There at your door.” That’s the thought that drives him crazy and led to the revolving door of trim in the first place. It’s all a very vicious cycle. He adds to the narrative on “Hold Still Don’t Talk,” “All the thrills are pills/Kiss one/All the girls are girls/Miss one/This one,” letting us believe in the false multitude. It all just bleeds into the shredder. He’s not ever going to be right, for as he rails, “I’m in love with how it breaks/I’m invisible today and fucking up.”

 
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