More Scared Of You Than You Are Of Me

The Smith St Band have recently released their fourth studio album “More Scared Of You Than You Are Of Me”. i have been following the smith st band for while and this is the first album that i have fully connected to and enjoyed the whole way through. This album still carries over that previous Pub Rock punk feel that they are so known for but i feel this album's emotional connection to Wil Wagner who is the Vocalist and guitarist for this melbourne band, is what connects it all together for me. The catchy hooks and ‘drunk sing-along’ choruses are all perfectly positioned throughout the album that it all feels like a night out in fitzroy bar hopping through grungy angsty live venues.

The first track on the album Forest is a love song and perfectly sums up the feelings that Wil was feeling when he wrote it. “I wanna kiss you on the mouth a little bit to hard” is the chorus hook and it is so relatable when put into the drunken pub crawl scene when you see that special someone across the room and have that uncontrollable lust for them. The musicality is your typical fast paced trashy grunge sound that has its tension, builds and releases all come and go so fast. My favourite thing about this track is the vocal ‘warble’ that will does in the chorus. He flicks between notes with what sounds like alternating breaths. With an inhale happening between each note giving a almost similar sound to yodeling.

The second song on the album continues seamlessly with it resting on a dry guitar riff and the first line being “I spent the morning, cleaning my room, in the hopes you’d ask to see it soon” and demonstrate my point of this seamless storytelling that comes with this album. Meeting someone for the first time in the previous song and then the mundane and overlooked task of making sure your room is clean for that person if they ever want to see it. Maybe its because i’m a single 21 year old but i find his lyrics relatable and the accompanying music sets the mood perfectly.

The last song i would like to talk about is the third to last song on the album and is my favorite. Suffer is an emotional angsty song that cover the struggles that come with some creative individuals. Aristotle put it perfectly when he said “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” this notion that people create things in times of suffering or distress is hard to handle for some people and this is what comes through in this song. “Go forth and suffer for your art If it's all you look for, you will always find the dark” is the chorus of the song and you can hear the internal struggle that Wil is having balancing his art and his life. Each line is a snippet of some of the things that are concerning him at the time and giving him anxiety about. A few of my favorite lines are:

“I'm half crying, half laughing and half pissed And I wanna fuck everybody in the supermarket

Everyone is so proud of their own self-reliance Right up until the cheque comes and you have to pay for dinner.

Everyone is so perfect and so open-minded Till you have a conversation where you are not the winner”