Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
There is beauty in the smallest place, even the murky puddle that forms under railway bridges or in that dip in the road where you have to cross over as you navigate your way to work, everything holds a story, all holds a sense of currency or bargaining chip to which can be seized upon as an asset, a shield against the feeling of the loneliness that often comes from being found in those conditions in the first place.
We have though become desensitised to other’s expressing the negative thoughts, we are urged to keep such people out of our lives, we get angry at having our thoughts invaded by those who are unhappy, abandoned, lost in some outpouring of grief, and then we treat them as we would if we found a Dead Driver slumped at the wheel of an expensive sports-car that has its engine running, we regret that we cannot just shove the driver aside, take the vehicle and run off with their life.
It is a damning indictment on the world and one that captures the sense of violence that is at the heart of humanity, one embroiled in selfish acts, punctuated by the occasional moment where a regret is soothed, and the shot glass of emptiness removed from sight. It is under the railway arch surrounded by those who see you as an equal, the braziers sending out flames of welcoming fire that reach out and seem to dance under the stars and one that Dog On A Stick openly suggest that they understand the dilemma and suffering found and that they wish to help highlight the loneliness; even if it just through the Universal language of music and pin point accurate lyrics bathed in a post-punk battle that rages against the system that has brought so many close to the edge of an abyss.
The violent riffs frame the sense of being forsaken and left behind by society, a reflection of schism that pervades in today’s world in which some are not just discarded, but openly ridiculed as more join their swelling number of the rejected and isolated. Dead Driver is a song that is cutting, almost sliding in perfectly to a new Beggar’s Opera for the 21st Century, and one that defines how we now view the lonely in the same way that Victorians viewed the poor.
A cracking single, one of great passion!
Dog On A Stick release Dead Driver on July 1st.
Ian D. Hall