Destry – It Goes On
Words: Gareth O’Malley
Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody once said that the key elements of his band’s music were ‘melody and honesty’, and when you take that into account, you can quite easily draw parallels between the multi-million selling UK group and the American indie-folk five-piece Destry. Comprised of former Straylight Run members Michella DaRosa and Shaun Cooper, as well as Tyler Odom, Nicole Childrey, and Sam Means (formerly of The Format) create acoustic-guitar driven songs, the focus being on melody and lyrics. Their debut album, ‘It Goes On’, has one major flaw. The fact that each of the record’s eleven songs were stitched together all around the States, patchwork fashion (Boaton, New York, Dallas, Nashville and Phoenix, respectively) really is quite obvious. The songs here sometimes seem quite distant, which is quite ironic when intimacy is one of the things so often associated with this genre.
However, if one manages to get past this, one will find that there is a lot to enjoy here. It’s disappointing, then, that it takes the album four songs to find its feet. While ‘Don’t Forget Me’ is an assertive opener, featuring some effective use of harmony (organs and horns are thrown into the mix as well), ‘So Far Away’ sounds a little too like it, melody-wise, so much so that the songs are almost interchangeable. ‘Leave The Light On’ is kind of a bridging point between the first two tracks and what is to come.
Then, with ‘Big Mouths’, ‘It Goes On’ really gets going. Harpsichord and strings are the backing to DeRosa’s plaintive vocals. It has quite the impressive chorus too – simple yet effective. It is also here that we see what a hopeless record this is lyrically; the resignation of a person to the end of a relationship is the subject matter explored here: ‘I could see this ending / I could see it just starting up again’. Similar sentiments are expressed in ‘Trouble’, a devastating account of a life gone wrong: ‘I gotta get out / I’m stuck in the box of hull of a sinking ship’. Uplifting music this ain’t.
Destry do know how to cover up such lyrics with gorgeous melodies, however. Case in point is the album’s title track. A simple, piano-led track, those harmonies surface again as two-and-half minutes of outstanding folk-pop reveal themselves – never mind that such things as friends that ‘made promises that they never kept’ are on DeRosa’s mind.
Unfortunately, there is another thing that detracts from the impact of these songs: Destry hardly seem to push themselves or vary their style. It will be interesting to see where the band take themselves on further endeavours, because here we have the foundations of something great.
7.7
mp3: Don’t Forget Me [alt]
MFM @ HYPEM
