The World is Beautiful if We Try
Illusory Walls, the latest album from The World is a Beautiful Place and I am No Longer Afraid to Die, is being billed primarily as the band’s densest work to date. It, of course, is. The album ends with a 20 minute song, immediately preceded by a 15 minute song; there’s functionally 0 hooks and only about two songs that can feasibly separated from the whole as “singles;” not to mention all the crazy drum syncopation and layered guitar heroics. It’s the kind of sprawling epic that only certain bands even ever attempt anymore.
I think when we think about albums like this there’s a clear shift from “an album that may get new people into listening to us” to “an album for the folks who love us already.” It is the most TWIABP album—rather than taking detours into new sounds or simplifying things for mass appeal, the group piles their usual signifiers high to give the ones who love them most something to chew on for a while. Luckily, they never quite push it over the edge to inscrutable territories. It’s a vivid depiction of the kind of large and small scale issues that color everyday American life.
The band primarily talks about work. How groups of people out there spend everyday pushing themselves to their limit well others sit off in their big houses reaping the rewards to send all their problems downstream. Call it the millennial update of Springsteen’s “Mansion on a Hill;” rather than pining for access to gleeful summer nights, the band is citing all the “workers that the owner killed.”
The band does achieve levity in their own way. Though there single “Invading the World of the Guilty as a Spirit of Vengeance” takes inequality head on, the final lyric underpins it with a joke. We all want an equitable world and healthcare (or whatever), but, hey, maybe just a day off or two would be enough. If there’s any glimmer of hope for the uninitiated its the sleights of hand that suggest that the post-rock gestures aren’t meant to be toooo serious. I mean the inevitable Chris Teti snare drum fills could convince anyone to jump in the pit like they’re 18 again and invinsible. We have to find someway to convince ourselves that beauty can be found there’s unfortunately no other way to live.
-Donovan Burtan