There’s a marsh along the White River that I’ve been hanging around in recently. Two weeks ago, when the flood waters ripped through Indianapolis, they submerged this marsh entirely. The temperamental currents took away the trees, tore up the grass, and ate a large chunk of the land. I’m sitting in the marsh on a piece of driftwood, smoking dabs out of a crack pipe, listening to my discovery station- taking in the devastation. It’s a heavy scene, and the dabs aren’t lightening the mood as much as I’d like, but then something special starts playing, and I realize today is a day that I’ve been waiting for.
Finally, the new Snorkeler single had dropped - with the shade that the turtles rested under gone, the vegetation that the cranes nested in destroyed, and the thickets in which wild snakes inhabited strewn about the place - my mood was dower. This song, however, managed to put a smile on my face. That song is, of course, “Take Everything Down.” You’ve heard it, you love it, and you know it certainly beats smoking pot jelly out of a glass straw.
“Take Everything Down” is an album seller; it’s a clear single. It has riffs that get stuck in your head, a simple arrangement that is engaging but easy to follow, a tempo change which comes with each chorus to keep the rhythm flowing and the sound fresh, an absolutely killer guitar solo, and a dazzling vocal performance. I frequently challenge the choice of singles a band uses to advertise their new albums; frankly, I think many acts make stupid choices when it comes to this. So, if you’re trying to decide which tunes to use to advertise your new album, take notes: “Take Everything Down” is the blueprint.
Instrumentally, the song doesn’t deviate much from standard Snorkeler fare. It’s an alt-rock tune with emphasis on the guitar. The meat of the beat is a one-two rhythm, which you could probably figure out how to play just by listening to the song a couple times, occasionally interspersed with fills that shatter the mind. The guitar is a back-and-forth of red-hot riffs, which stick in your brain like pipe resin sticks in your fingernails. It’s a brutally 2010s sound, wildly upbeat despite the content of the lyrics.
“Take Everything Down” is three straight minutes of unfiltered shit talking. It gives the impression that it’s pointed at a scumbag ex; however, there isn’t anything that directly implies this in the song, so maybe that’s just in my head. This mixed with the peppy alternative instrumentals screams late Obama-era rock. The raw optimism and glee the music inspires, pushed up against the spite in the lyrics, makes for the exact sort of tune you would hear on the alt-rock radio stations of that time. It’s something I would have screamed from the bed of one of my buddies' rust bucket trucks as we careened down some country road on a summer night in 2015.
I let “Take Everything Down” wash over me as I took in the mangled wetlands. As I listened to the song once, then once more and then several more times for good measure, I felt my mood lighten. Even in the middle of this disaster zone, I felt that wave of optimism wash over me. I felt for the first time in a while that maybe, just maybe, all was not fucked. A song may not seem like very much; in the grand scheme, it’s nothing but particularly pleasing vibrations after all, but in the wake of such carnage, what do we have left to treasure but those little things?
