Written by: Dave Cantrell
OK, to be honest (is there any other way to be in this business?), your correspondent has been waylaid by a not-insignificant personal event so is allowing himself to crib the intro prose just below from esteemed singer-songwriter Garrett Martin before, as was planned, turning the content over to the band themselves. Unorthodox? Yeah, a bit, but this time there’s just no other way. So, quick essential details: this is the latest full-length from Atlanta band Go Public and we gotta tell ya, from what we’ve been able to hear this past couple days, it’s a corker, which is to say that, of any possible scenario where it would be necessary to take the path we’re taking here, it’s difficult to think of a better candidate than Go Public. Their sound is so effortlessly solid it beggars belief that this is their debut but then again, it’s exactly that that makes us keep going then keep going some more and on and on. It’s a kind of magic, really, a conjuring of the most gratifying kind. So, settle in (or not, your choice; you can – and may be unable not to – dance about your listening space like a thing unhinged) and enjoy still another fabulous example of why this ‘indie’ music in all its dizzying styles and energies will never go quiet. And that, dear readers, for this writer/fan/fanatic, is exactly the tonic needed on a day like this. En-fking-joy…
The past isn’t real, the future ain’t happening, all we’ve got is right now and Go Public and You Are Traffic: Hey now, don’t dream it’s over. An Atlanta band naming a record after traffic might be like dropping a two-ton anvil right on the biggest Bozo-red clown nose imaginable, but there are levels to every parking deck. Maybe it’s a gridlock of the soul? The close-together shame of becoming a stranger, a slow motion accident of skeleton details? This band’s business—skronky contortions and nope wave deconstructions, prickly wisdom and post-punk pith—is ageless yet absolutely right this very moment, distilling the cosmically unique pointlessness of this number that never should’ve become a year, and magnifying the microscopic glimmer of hope at its furthest corner. Call it dice-roll politics: a saving throw at a craps tempo—bleakly vibrant jams for endtime dance parties.
These men have been in bands. You have maybe heard those bands, if you live in Georgia, or are their friends. Their bands were good; this band is great. Go Public can drop names, a whole catholic education of influences and inspirations, from every acre of the radio dial; but what matters is what comes out, not what goes in. You Are Traffic has few peers; brittle but hard-boiled, it’s a swinging splatterhouse of booksmart, tough guy art with the jittery anxiety of Talking Heads and the restless musicality of This Heat in equal measure. The guitar sounds like a dayglo glass sword, for Christ’s sake. Sean Rawls and Adrian Finch yelp and squelch frantic findings while Sam Gunn and Jay Domingo hold everything down with one-mind chops and muscle memory, culminating in a crucial half-hour of modern American noise unrestrained by any boundaries, be they stylistic or terrestrial. You Are Traffic and you’re reading this on whatever day this is and it’s the perfect time to get personal with Go Public.–Garrett Martin
[you’ll find the player down below and we can but wholeheartedly suggest you scroll down, hit play, then scroll back up for the commentary]With Muscle Memory
Welcome to the machine, concrete bolts with plastic cracks, catapults and plexiglass. Soldered into corporate board, park repeat, treadmills track the devils dividends, year over year over year, race of doom, metropolis
Skeleton Details
Its racket trash, its trash racket, the medicine makes you sick, the toothpaste gives you cavities, you want the one you cant have, but if you had it you wouldnt want it anymore, the tire shop is dumping nails and screws right there in the parking lot, the DMV is selling fake temp tags but it all goes in the same garbage truck, the aluminum, the glass, the hard plastic, the soft plastic, every meticulously and religiously sorted piece of trash goes to the same dump
3
Dream Over
There is a Korean film called Broker, where an accidental family, assembled by fate on a misadventure to sell an orphaned baby to loving parents on the black market, is broken up by law enforcement. Sin is a symptom of something worse. When blood becomes thinner than politics, hemorrhage is next. Inclusion without exclusion is impossible.
Close Together Shame
As if our masks werent thick enough, we rode around in these toxic exoskeletons, desperate strangers locked in a deadly game of red light, spilling human blood for plastic gods and cash, rolling dice for miles into the static, “its come to this”
5
Craps Tempo
It was the easiest thing to do, everything was, to slip into a spiralling circle of puppets gurgling down the gullet of another sales funnel for Satan, a steaming torrent of blood, metal and oil, seatbelt edges cut across your sweating baby neck, a thousand hot highways, constriction straps, the helpless jaws of death, human rat traps, it was easy street, 360 degrees
6
Hat Head
“I remember seeing a stick with a heart on it, and it was beating very, very fast. And I was hearing it and also an alarm. And then in blue I saw ‘ heart attack ‘ flashing red and blue lights. I had a huge pain shove up my spine and remembered seeing my spine grind and electricity shooting up through it.
This was very painful. I then stopped for the night. Went up in my room and cried.”
from “A Second World” by Apricey
7
Becoming a Stranger
Its just the chance of growing apart, so far so far, trenchcoat to trenchcoat, vampire collars tickle your ears. Just when you think youre finally free, your future is your history, somebody else’s fantasy, fades in delirious mist, subway vapor
8
Home of the Grave
Everybody is hungry but nobody wants to be eaten, what can you do. They found a mutilated cow in a crop circle with an udder for every enzyme. How do you talk a cow into a situation like that. Where does food even come from. Do mysteries exist?
9
GOLF
Is there anything to not strap a jet engine to? to see how fast and how far it goes before crashing? or how fast and for how long it might spin like a giant, clumsy Catherine Wheel, bouncing around and crashing into everything, through windows into houses, onto busy highways, into the gorilla enclosure? Wheelchairs, mop buckets, microwaves, lawnmowers, they will all have their chance
10
Slow Motion Accident
Your secretary mind has been hiding information from you to keep you railed on corporate lines. It has dutifully withheld the gap between the map and the territory but is running out of coverage. You have drifted into exclusion and nobody told you, nobody can tell you. The lifeboats expired years ago, the soup is full of sand, parachutes made of playdough
