2:00 AM Wake Up Call -- Dead City
In Dead City, 2:00 AM Wake Up Call encapsulates the curious tension of this moment: how can you feel nostalgia while you're still young -- and what do you do with pain caused by a world that rejects you?
With Dead City, 2:00 AM Wake Up Call creates a comprehensive view of what it means to be alive at this moment. I don't know about you, but I feel this weird sense of nostalgia even though I'm not that old? And that is also true for people who are much younger than me.
Perhaps that's why the album opener, "CD Age," is somehow bouncy and mournful at the same time. It's a delicious tension that describes the feel of the entire album: we are young and alive and also so, so, sad. "Composition Book" follows in this vein, a spritely rocker with a head-nodding groove that mourns the people who leave us far too soon. 2:00 AM Wake Up Call grapples with that pain as well: "Paper and Pens" contemplates what we leave behind with our art, and how the people who consume it can never truly recreate how we feel.
"If I Could Go Back" is the most traditionally country-inflected here, as if to drive home that sense of classic nostalgia. It's not until the song's refrain is echoed later, in the album's devastating title track, that the full range of rage, peeking around the corner of sadness, is felt. How do you feel alienated from a past that isn't even that distant, for life to move on while the people you love most can't follow?
