What If We Fall?
Sarah Fuller Hall
Posted On August 7, 2016
If you are looking for some new tunes to accompany your last car trip of Summer 2016, try Grand Shell Game’s EP “Man on a Wire.”
This roots-rock band displays their versatility and creativity throughout six unique songs, each much different than the others. You will want to listen a first time just to be surprised by what’s next, then listen repeatedly to examine and contemplate the messages embedded in the songs’s layers.
The album’s first track and title song paints a picture of the artistic crime of the century, in 1974, when Frenchman Philippe Petit danced for almost an hour on a wire suspended between the towers of the World Trade Center high above the streets of New York without a safety net. This arrangement is filled with imagery. The vocal line provides a lilting, dancing narrative above a churning, frenzied accompaniment representing the chaotic scenes below and around the world. Petit was apprehended by police, but his spirit sails on and feels present through the rest of the songs.
The album has a theatrical form and feel, fostered by the emotive vocals of lead singer and songwriter Eric-Scott Guthrie. He moves fluidly through vocal styles, whether rock, folk or Eric Idle-esque.
Questions are rife on the first half of the album: “What if they fall? What is the cost? Who are we free to be? Why am I afraid to try? Do we matter at all?” just to mention a few. Then the fourth track, “Note to Self,” set to a carnival waltz accompaniment, asks no questions, but instead reminds the listener that life is found in the journey to discovery and not in answers. This gives way to more questions and contemplation in “Some Socratic Oath,” the most personal song of the EP.
The finale, “Love,” wraps everything up with only a few words couched in an arrangement beginning with a lone acoustic guitar interlude ushering in simple, repeated lyrics: “Do-do-do-do. All I want… all I need…” and after much anticipation “is love.” The word “love” is uplifted and glorified with vocal harmonies and instruments joining in, leading to a climax with “Do love.”
Because in the end, love is what really matters. And learning how to fall.
_____________________________________________________________________
The Grand Shell Game are Dan Fields, Dylan Turner, Joe MacPhail, Rob DiMauro, Rob Davis, e-s guthrie. They are based in Carrboro, NC.
