"DESPERATELY IMAGINING SOMEPLACE QUIET"
DISQDISQ:
Raina Bock: Vocals, Bass Guitar
Shannon Connor: Vocals, Guitars, Keyboards
Isaac DeBroux-Slone: Vocals, Guitars
Stu Manley: Drums, Percussion, Backing Vocals
Logan Severson: Vocals, Guitars
with additional performances and vocals by Johanna Samuels, Casey Butler, Graham Hunt, and Matt Schuessler
All music and lyrics by Disq
Artwork by David Compos
Layout by Emma Headley
Produced, Mixed and Engineered by Matt Schuessler
Co Produced and Co-Engineered by Disq
Released October 7, 2022
This album only could have been made right now.
Over two years ago, most specifically upon March 6, 2020, the Madison, WI based indie rock quintet Disq, released their debut album "Collector," a stellar, exuberantly composed and performed work that fulfilled the promise of the band as created by life long friends and co-founders Raina Bock (songwriter/bassist) and Isaac de Broux-Slone (songwriter/singer/multi-instrumentalist) and executed upon their dazzling mission statement "Disq 1," self-released during their high school years on July 11, 2016.
Officially expanding the ranks from the original core duo to five--now featuring Shannon Connor (songwriter/singer/guitarist), Stu Manley (drums, percussion) and Logan Severson (songwriter/singer/guitarist)--"Collector" served as an energetic, earnest and often poignant arrival displaying the collective statement of five young individuals attempting to navigate an already dark world that was rapidly growing darker. These were expertly written and deeply felt songs from serious musicians matched with the passion of the craft at which they were recorded and performed.
And even with so much about the album that was celebratory, Disq's "Collector" was inadvertently and grimly prescient.
Within a week of the album's release, and just before the band was set to embark to Europe for their promotional tour, the world completely shut down due to the full arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing everything to a standstill...as if reeling from the ongoing turmoil of the Trump administration's post truth/anti-Science society plus rising terrors in sexism, homophobia, White nationalism, fascism and our climate crisis weren't enough. For a band whose profile was rising, the Covid shut down was a devastating blow and truthfully, I would not have blamed them for a moment if whatever music arrived in the future was more downbeat and mournful. Or even moreso, if they had decided to call it a day.
Now, we have a response.
Disq's "Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet," is sensational. Eschewing any potential traces of the dreaded "sophomore slump," the band has emerged triumphant as their second album extends far beyond "Collector" with an even greater eclecticism, experimentation, and unwavering determination. With a greater democracy from the songwriting and sharing of lead vocals throughout, Disq has re-emerged not as a band having licked its wounds and tentatively striking out to try again. But more as a brand new band emerging akin to a phoenix from the ashes of two years ago, albeit with the same five members and armed with an even hungrier sense of resolve and expansive drive to create an artistic statement that is committed to meeting this moment in the face while also being built to last.
After some electronic sounds suggesting a machine warming up and the deadpan announcement of the word "MUSIC," "Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet" explodes to life with Shannon Connor's propulsive "Civilization Four," a "what is the world coming to" opening salvo during which he repeatedly demands "Please explain the joke" to understand why the world has seemingly flown from its axis into what must be the horrific parallel universe in which we currently exist.
Just as the dire nature of song threatens to overwhelm Connor, Raina Bock, making her debut as a lead vocalist and lyricist, arrives just in time with a sage perspective.
"Now that the thought screams more than the memory
Closing your eyes hurts more than the sensory
Sifting through sounds is just like the other thing
Circling round is just like a wedding ring"
All five members, moving as one, surge ahead in ferocious musical lockstep (and dodging falling bombs in the process) in a manner that suggests flight and fight against/with the accelerated velocity of life in an increasingly unforgiving world. It is a thrilling opening, setting the s6age for all yet to arrive.
Bookended by sequences of rhythmic yet increasingly volatile cacophony, Logan Severson's shimmering "Prize Contest Life" suggests the mantra used to find shelter from the storm, whether emotional, psychological, societal or all of the above.
"Bright, never ending light
Ever changing shapes, dancing in the sky
Things I knew before, come back to my mind
I can see the glow, shining all the time
In every life, buried deep inside
There's a secret door, on the other side
Every single thought, floating in the tide
I can feel it pull, nothing left to hide
I know where you go to
It's so high above you
You'll know just what to do
When it's time to"
The song's gentleness, as conveyed through its bed of acoustic guitars, loping rhythms courtesy of Bock's bass work and Stu Manley's drums, plus the breeze of harmony vocals often suggesting a lullaby, the song oddly reminded me a bit of Todd Rundgren's synthetic meditation spiritual journey "Healing parts I, II & III" from "Healing" (released January 28, 1981). Even so, and especially as we find ourselves growing calmer and more lost in the tranquility, life's noise re-emerges violently a la the conclusion of The Beatles' "A Day In The Life," threatening to swallow us whole and drowning Severson's screams.
Raina Bock makes her full bodied debut as a composer and lead singer with the striking, creepy "Cujo Kiddies," a selection that pushes Disq into more electronic, and therefore, emotionally colder territory. Bock's lyrics and melodic yet detached singing style feels to conjure up the quandary of navigating the world through a plastic face burying the reality of self underneath, even if you are struggling to define yourself, whether through issues of sobriety, sexual identity, or adjoining or losing oneself to technology. "I finally hooked up with the metal machine/I'm finding comfort in the metal machine," sings Bock repeatedly as the song grows more sinister, with the status of her own sense of humanity in the balance.
Building upon past Disq singles "Communication" and "Parallel" (released January 25, 2019), Isaac de Broux-Slone makes his first lead vocal appearance on the album with the high flying "This Time," a track that delves even deeper into the maelstrom of interpersonal relationships, how they try, and often fail, to connect, despite the urgency of our best efforts and intents.
"And now I'm trying too hard
'Cause I don't know where to begin
I wonder how to escape
And now I realize I can't 'cause I don't know myself
If all I know is you"
On an outro that serves a staggeringly melodic twin guitar line, the kind of which makes you reach for your air guitars as your eyes fill with tears, the album's motif of potentially losing one's own sense of self precisely at the moment it might already be lost for fear of never regaining it arises again.
Pastoral philosophical musings arrive in Shannon's Connor's delicate track "The Curtain," tucked gently in the space somewhere between mid-period XTC and Connor and Stu Manley's previous band Post Social. "Did you think it through well enough?" Connor asks of himself as a series of questions that have no instantly attainable answers grow into a kaleidoscopic swirl, augmented by crystalline acoustic guitars, handclaps and Manley's percolating percussion, before concluding in exhaustion. Yet, there's no time to rest and recover as "The Curtain" leads directly into the darkened, threatening skies of Logan Severson's "The Hardest Part," a "great big shakedown" of ambiguity that congeals into a pounding "head full of 'I don't knows'" amplified by Stu Manley's mule kick snare drum.
Heartbreaks and soul aches return (or continue) in Isaac de Broux-Slone's "If Only," stunning slice of timeless power pop, where Disq miraculously injects both country and prog leanings through de Broux-Slone's fiddle playing and guitar wizardry as the music works in lockstep with the lyrics. Rising and falling, the song absolutely soars yet when de Broux-Slone sings the absolutely perfect couplet, "You build me up on Sunday/I'm down again by Monday," the music buckles under the emotional weight. You can almost hear his knees giving out due to the sorrow in his heart.
And then, we fall into Raina Bock's daydream...
Phasing into the constantly audacious, shape shifting, lusty "Charley Chimp," a track as if pulled from the ether, like Prince's "The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker," it is one that continuously reveals itself as Bock unveils a tale of the push and pull between her intellect and more animalistic instincts that reveal themselves underneath the sway of every arrival of "that one thing" in a "Catwoman outfit" and punctuated by Logan Severson's succulent bass playing. Like any dream, the song is one that is impossible to pin down and all you can do is to allow it to gloriously wash over you.
From the depths of fantasy, we return to brutally harsh realities with the album's one-two death punch of Logan Severson's slashing "Tightrope" and Shannon Connor's annihilating "(With Respect To) Loyal Serfs." On the former, Severson and his bandmates create an eviscerating soundscape filled with quiet-loud-quiet dynamics that build into an army of buzzsaw guitars which are determined to lacerate the song in half.
On the latter, and through molten lava guitars and Stu Manley's death knell drums, Connor channels his best Roger Waters by way of Metallica ("Goodnight to planet Earth") to create a lament for the planet that is as sardonic as it is rapacious. It is as if the incredulity of the album's opening track has extended into grave inevitability as our extinction will undoubtedly arrive at our own hands and frankly...we've had it coming. As stewards of the planet, we have failed and the existential rage and howl contained in these two songs are palpable.
As the dust settles, Isaac de Broux-Slone returns one last time with the fragile "Meant To Be," starring a melody that feels so familiar and yet long forgotten but somehow magically plucked from the sea of time by its supremely gifted songwriter.
"Do you think about me
It's been so long now I can't see
But I still try to believe
The way things are is meant to be
Do you think about me
A crystal ball that I can't read
Cause somehow all that I see
Is a future with you next to me
The way things are is meant to be"
While framed in the aftermath of a relationship, "Meant To Be," could also be a statement reaching outwards to the state of the world at this point in time, making it a song of acceptance despite the pain and turmoil. For no matter how much we wish for things to be different, we are where we are and it is up to us to determine how we are going to live in the reality we have been given, whether nursing a broken heart or teetering on the end of the world.
Raina Bock gets the final word upon the album and what a bold, unflinching, whimsically chilling word it is! With "Hitting A Nail With A BB Gun," Bock conjures up another synthscape dreamscape that suggests Brian Wilson at his weirdest and most poignant, as if The Beach Boys' "I Guess I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" and "A Day In The Life Of A Tree" congealed and birthed this song.
Speak-singing a narrative that reminded me darkly of an HBO series entitled "Years And Years," set just a few short years in the future from now and featuring a character who wished to become "transhuman," therefore merging her flesh and blood body into artificial intelligence itself, Bock's lyrics fluctuate between "I don't wanna be alive/I wanna be A.I." and "I don't wanna die/I wanna be A.I." (possibly maybe a nod to Disq's "I Wanna Die" from "Collector"?) perhaps suggesting a wish to maintain existence but without the trauma of being human.
After all of the passion, heart and fury, the album quietly sputters to a mechanized close, exhausted and spent from all that transpired...yet still inspires you to immediately press PLAY and hear it all over again.
As previously stated, Disq's "Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet" only could have been made right now. If circumstances had been different two years ago, if the pandemic had never occurred, if Disq had been able to cultivate and ride whatever wave "Collector" could have inspired, whatever the band created as their follow up would have been completely different from what they ended up creating.
That being said, and knowing what happened has indeed happened, Disq created this album and it is more than I could have ever hoped to have heard from this unit without question. With full disclosure, I do have a personal relationship with the band members as they are people I genuinely love. That also being said, Disq created the very type of album that I would cherish if I did not know them personally. An album very much in the universe of albums that upended me with their artistry, grabbed me by the heart and made me a devotee, listening and re-listening and re-listening further still being fully enveloped into the musical world envisioned.
I am reminded of albums like Prince's "1999" (released October 27, 1982), XTC's "Oranges And Lemons" (released February 27, 1989), The Smashing Pumpkins' "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" (released October 24, 1995), Tame Impala's "Lonerism" (released October 5, 2012) and Sloan's "Commonwealth" (released September 9, 2014) to name just a few.
And yet, my musical brain keeps shifting to none other than Pink Floyd's iconic "The Dark Side Of The Moon" (released March 1, 1973). not in terms of the actual sound but of the conceptual reach and completed vision, as Disq seemingly confronts exactly what it means to live and survive the times in which we all currently share. and the difficulties of remaining humane in a world that is growing dangerously inhumane. The band meets this moment miraculously, beautifully and brilliantly, without trepidation of fear and it is decidedly not tentative or muted. And most importantly, the band meets this time together through the bonds of their friendships and combined musical gifts.
One minor criticism of "Collector" that actually infuriated me was one that suggested that the band's debut album was perhaps too eclectic. That if they had simple picked one musical lane, it might have made for a more cohesive experience. Truly the worst advice for a band like Disq for it is not their job to temper their abilities to make it easier for a music journalist to write about them. It is the job of the band to create fearlessly, blaze their own lane and for listeners to come to them!
Honestly, truly think of the amount of music that exists within the five members of Disq, a collective that contains five multi-instrumentalists and four songwriters and singers. Should this band really be relegated to solely bring the compositions of one member to life when there is so much to pull from? I do understand that on paper, it may sound like a bit of a mess but the greater democracy of Disq, one which gives each songwriter the same amount of musical real estate upon the album, ultimately delivered a boldly unified and somehow singular band statement.
Disq's "Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet" is a complete work of art, that has been superbly fine crafted in every area and detail from the songs themselves to its packaging. From the acronym of the album's title to its cover artwork--which felt to me to be a foreboding response to the visual sunshine psychedelia of the artwork seen upon the band digital single, their sky high cover version of Jeff Tweedy's "I Know What It's Like" (released June 30, 2020)--to its sequencing, sonic delivery (again...that snare drum sound is spectacular) and near elimination of pauses between tracks, it is difficult to simply pull one song from the album to represent the whole. In doing so, the album almost feels like one big song split into movements, therefore making the experience more cohesive than some skeptical music journalists might suspect.
Additionally. and despite their youth, all five members are seasoned musicians. Through their long history with each other and their musical contemporaries, during which they have all written, performed and recorded with each other in a variety of bands and projects, we are seeing musicians that are as malleable as they are gifted, who work without ego and as always, treat the song itself as the star of the show. As the band embraces each song, they also embrace each other and it is in their union where we find such balance, grace and connectivity which extends to the listener rapturously which then, builds our empathy towards the album and the statements woven throughout.
It's all in the title. Disq's' "Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet" is a testament to the bond held between five skilled and deeply feeling individuals white knuckling life together and right alongside us. It is an album that speaks directly to the tension of trying to hold oneself together and the release that happens when one cannot shoulder the stress and strain to repress any longer. Certainly, the members of Disq are old and wise enough to understand the realities and inevitabilities of life's unfairness. However, the album displays a more than justified rage against the previous generation's inability to not leave them a dying world to grow up within.
In a year of music that has already delivered so generously with albums of power and purpose from artists veteran and rising, Disq has emerged with one of 2022's highest achievements to my ears. If they could pull this off, I think and furthermore, believe, that they can now go anywhere and do anything they set their collective minds towards.
