It might be the recent groundswell of reminiscence and (re)discovery of the Talking Heads‘ Stop Making Sense that motivated Kyle Sowash to title the Kyle Sowashes’ latest album Start Making Sense. Such wordplay with music icons is nothing new for the group, whose often funny and always rocking 2020 live album was called Not Exactly Budokan. However, Start Making Sense is a reasonable demand and a fitting banner for the conflicted fatalism that runs throughout this collection of new songs.
In Start Making Sense, the spirit to make some change is willing, but the systems are weak. The titles of the first three songs bring this point home again and again: “I’m Sorry, But We’ve Done Everything We Can Do at This Point”, “It Doesn’t Really Matter What You Think”, and “What Do You Want Me to Do About It?” Combine these with “I Don’t Like What I Am Hearing”, “I Guess I’m Still Weird About It,” and “I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore”, and it’s apparent that not since the Magnetic Fields‘ i has an album been so purposefully powered by fixating on the first-person perspective and sorting out whose business is whose. Despite this motif, though, the record is not solipsistic.
Instead, these songs play like a collective call to rock out in lieu of solutions or at least to rock until the solutions materialize. For example, on “What Do You Want Me to Do About It?”, the singer’s concession that “I really couldn’t help you if I tried” is followed by a guitar solo that seems aimed to achieve what words cannot. The next song, “I Don’t Like What I Am Hearing”, varies the same formula, this time with concluding horns rather than a guitar solo. That is not to say the song lacks a guitar solo, though. Solos abound on Start Making Sense.
In fact, Start Making Sense stacks up so many satisfying classic rock moves that the concept of being out of options grows more ironic as the collection of songs proceeds. Sowash and the band so effortlessly deploy their self-described “nostalgic indie rock” that, for listeners of a particular persuasion, the effect is comfort rather than a crisis of confidence. So if this is nostalgic rock, it is at least a knowing brand that keeps a torch burning for workmanlike rock and roll. This intention is most overtly signalled in “Song for Joey Kramer”, which memorializes the Aerosmith drummer in a manner akin to Cabana Wear’s Metallica homage, “St. Napster”.
The album’s other vivid character studies, “Go Bananas” and “Napoleon”, are coarser in subject and more incisive in perspective about the wars or voids within leaders or aggressors. Those wanting to project the strange, sad politics of the times onto Start Making Sense could find fertile ground in these songs.
Still, such an interpretation might dilute the memorable particulars of the characters here. The title track is likewise multivalent. Sure, initially, it is a prayer for the Cleveland Browns. However, Sowash uses this reference like the Fiery Furnaces did with their Chicago White Sox song “1917”, in which the desire for a win extends (narratively and emotionally) beyond the field. Start Making Sense might soundtrack a losing streak, but its anthems resist defeat.