Local Airwaves is your source for the lowdown on tracks soon to be heard on WKNC. This week’s album is “What’s on your mind?” by Arson Daily.
North Carolina is a good place to start out as an indie band; what with Raleigh and Chapel Hill’s sizeable indie rock scene, Asheville in general (the Portland of the Carolinas), or the bohemian paradise that is Boone. Such is the case with local indie rock outfit Arson Daily, hailing from the land of the mountaineers and making their way through the North Carolina indie scene rapidly. Their latest release, “What’s on Your Mind?” is a five-song EP and follows their debut, self-titled EP in 2016.
From the cover alone, this EP appears straightforward, evoking the likeness of indie garage rock standards like Fuzz, Thee Oh Sees and White Reaper. Indeed, these would serve as accurate comparisons, with echoed vocals, fuzz pedals and aggressive, choppy guitars all being common ground for these bands and Arson Daily.
Now, to be clear, it’s rarely useful to string along a list of colorful adjectives when attempting to describe a band’s sound. Another easy strategy would be to list any number of similar sounding bands, but this isn’t particularly creative and serves only to inform those already familiar with the genre. I try to stay away from that as much as possible, personally opting to paint a verbal image of what the sound evokes using words. Often though, just one type of description doesn’t particularly cut it, either because the resulting description is too vague or it doesn’t properly display the strengths of the album or band. In this case, I’ll try to use a mix of the three.
It’s not that Arson Daily is so complex of a band that I couldn’t possibly describe them; in fact, one of the band’s strengths is in the simplicity and refined nature of their sound. It’s more so that this EP stands out among many others in such a way that I feel deserves a special focus of attention, a more in depth understanding of what makes the EP worth listening to. So to start, a string of adjectives: “What’s on your mind?” is indie garage rock at its core, with choppy, abrasive instrumentation, echo on the vocals, a short decay on the guitars and a particularly simple setup that favors basic percussion, one or two guitars and a strong reliance on vocals to carry the melody. The EP also has a particularly strong blues undertone, such that you might say it’s a bit like southern rock. This element particularly helps set Arson Daily apart from the litany of bands I’m about to compare them to.
Having established that Arson Daily sounds similar to Fuzz, White Reaper and Thee Oh Sees for a number of reasons, the group actually bears more resemblance to perhaps King Tuff or Beware of Darkness. The latter of those two is more accurate, but less well known. Either way, these bands share more of that semi-southern, bluesy element that Arson Daily has going on. It’s a cool element to their sound that gives it more character than traditional garage rock, evoking a more specific sound that hails from a specific place: North Carolina. Those unfamiliar with either King Tuff or Beware of Darkness will find in Arson Daily’s sound a certain vague familiarity with the Black Crowes and Cage the Elephant.
Finally, to really drive home what this EP is, I find it easiest to picture the fantasized version of the musicians performing it and where they would be performing it in the ideal music video. For me, I see a bunch gruff, mid-twenties, sunglasses-clad hipsters in the dirt and gravel of an abandoned construction site in the middle of nowhere. The clothes they wear are torn, and honestly you could say they’re only being hipsters ironically, which is in itself ironic. Call it an overdose of postmodernism. Basically Cage the Elephant’s “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked,” filmed in 2017, with darker clothing, and slightly cooler, more dangerous-looking band members. And just better overall. There you have it. Now go get Arson Daily on your mind.
