It was just after seven in the afternoon that the sun set today. I had rolled out of bed not an hour beforehand, and so, in order to ready myself for another brutal night of chasing what’s new in the music scene, I took to my kitchen for breakfast. The meal was excessive by all regards: two cheddar jalapeño bagels with cream cheese, four fried eggs smothered in oregano and honey, a bowl of cereal, two chai teas, three beers, seven bananas, a joint, seven strips of turkey bacon, two slices of sourdough toast covered with homemade apple butter, and a rice cake smeared with peanut butter. So, there I was in my kitchen, smoking and frying my eggs to crisp perfection, when the call came in; the new Reece Young single had dropped.
Reece Young is, of course, the Nashville transplant originally from New Jersey, the land famous for Bruce Springsteen and the “Clerks” movies. Young began his music career in Nashville by dipping his feet into alternative metal but, along the way, strayed ever further into the alternative side of things, leading him to his current position somewhere between indie rock and hardcore. It’s been an ever-shifting path for Reece through several EPs and a dozen singles over the course of five years, and today, Young makes his next step forward.
This is the new single “I Taste Blood” we’re talking about here, a melancholic trip into the inner workings of Reece’s struggle with loss. Young wrote the tune after his father suffered a health scare, which left the Nashvillian caught between an existential dread surrounding the inevitable aging of his loved ones and a sense of gratitude for the time he still had remaining with them. The song is about one of the oldest struggles known to man, one that all of us have to deal with sooner or later; we’re all gonna die, and most of us are going to have to watch someone we treasure go first.
From an instrumental standpoint, the song mixes modern synth-pop with heavier grunge-inspired beats. It has a sorrowful, trilling synthesizer duking it out with this stomping bass drum, which beats at you like a police baton repeatedly beats at a door before it is kicked down without a warrant. It’s this combination of burning rage and hollow grief which begins slowly, then swells to an all-out onslaught, only to then recede back into the lower depths of itself to start the process all over again.
You can find “I Taste Blood” streaming everywhere today. I would recommend, after you have a heart-clogging serving of bacon and eggs, that you lock yourself somewhere in the dank recesses of your home for this one. Somewhere the light can’t reach, where you may brood over Young’s dogfight with himself in peace. It’s the only way to enjoy this musical tsunami, this eulogy mixed with an ode to living, properly.
@iamreeceyoung
