{"id":29450,"date":"2019-10-03T13:03:44","date_gmt":"2019-10-03T17:03:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/?p=29450"},"modified":"2019-10-09T22:06:30","modified_gmt":"2019-10-10T02:06:30","slug":"album-review-microwave-death-is-a-warm-blanket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/album-review-microwave-death-is-a-warm-blanket\/","title":{"rendered":"ALBUM REVIEW: Microwave Solidifies Lyrical Superiority on Death is a Warm Blanket"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\">It\u2019s inevitable that your favorite bands will eventually release an album that challenges you in some way. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/category\/columns\/playing-atlanta\/\">Georgia<\/a> band <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcrwv.com\/\">Microwave\u2019s<\/a> newest release, <i>Death is a Warm Blanket<\/i>, is certainly one of those albums for me.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Their 2016 LP, <i>Much Love<\/i>, a heartrending thirty minutes of beautifully written and arranged tracks lamenting the complexities of love, metal health, and crises of faith, made quick work of cementing its place on my all time favorites list. This is partially due to the machinations of main vocalist Nathan Hardy, whose incredible voice finds the perfect balance between raw and tender with deceptive ease. One of <i>Much Love&#8217;s <\/i>trademarks is songs that switch gears halfway through, with ambling, lullaby-like melodies that devolve into vocal stylings one would expect to hear on a full-blown emo album.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">On <i>Death is a Warm Blanket<\/i>, Hardy and his bandmates Tyler Hill (bass), Timothy Pittard (drums), and Wesley Swanson (guitar) have certainly not abandoned their love for frequent tonal shifts, but instead have decided to lean more heavily into their propensity for discordant sounds, throat-shredding vocals, and couch-tipping despair.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: Death is a Warm Blanket\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/album\/3Npw95CLeKN2N2X7KgLl5r?si=wr0up081SCK64VL7ki2VIA&#038;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><i>Write off all of your old friends<\/i>, advises Hardy on album standout \u201cHate TKO.\u201d\u00a0<i>Tolerance\u00a0is a well-swept path to hell<\/i>. Something I\u2019ve always loved about Microwave is that not only can they deliver a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/show-review-daddy-issues-foxing-now-now-august-hall\/\">gut-twister of a line about romantic relationships<\/a> (see: <i>Cause I\u2019m not yours\/no, that\u2019s not right\/I\u2019m just a novelty you\u2019re toying with to complicate your life<\/i> from<i> Much Love\u2019s<\/i> \u201cWhimper\u201d) they can deliver equally heartrending lines about the complexities of friendship, or, worse, your relationship with yourself.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Considering that my relationship with Microwave so far has been one of tunnel-minded infatuation with <i>Much Love<\/i>, <i>Death is a Warm Blanket<\/i> required some adjustment on my part. The band\u2019s writing prowess is still undeniable, but upon the first few\u00a0 listens of <i>Death<\/i> it was hard for me, as someone who does not gravitate towards emo\/post-emo and hardcore music, to connect as immediately with the new songs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Despite this, a few weeks out from release, I have had a love affair with almost every song on <i>Death is a Warm Blanket<\/i>, always a good sign for an album\u2019s potential staying power. Of course there are those albums you experience like a burr in a blanket, the ones that enjoy repeat plays for weeks, months, even years, but it take a special succession of episodic experiences for an album to stick with you for the long haul, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/only-noise-how-pup-and-punk-rock-changed-my-relationship-with-physical-intimacy\/\">a knot tied tight in the tapestry of your musical life<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Unlike <em>Much Love<\/em>, <i>Death is a Warm Blanket<\/i> is not a easy listen. Microwave still pays close attention to the transitions between songs \u2014 the one between \u201cPull\u201d and \u201cLove\u2019s Will Tear Us Apart\u201d is so imperceptible as to almost seem like an accident \u2014 but there is no one and nothing to blame for the lack of ease other than the plain fact that this album choking with disappointment. I think it\u2019s too easy to say that an album with one hand gripped firmly around the emo moon landing flag is \u201cangry.\u201d Anger, to me, implies a baselessness, a throw-it-at-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks attitude, like the punks of yore punching down with reckless abandon, using the guise of rebellion to hide the fact that they\u2019ve got their heads as far up their ass as the rest of us.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">There is nothing baseless about the disappointment and exhaustion that coat this album. There is certainly a level of theatricality \u2014 the Frankensteinian\u00a0townspeople metaphor in \u201cHate TKO\u201d comes to mind, as well as the fact that they opened the album with a song called \u201cLeather Daddy\u201d \u2014 but the title song really distills the album down to its discomforting essence with a single line. <i>I really needed a blanket\/I didn\u2019t know how to ask,<\/i> Hardy sings on \u201cDIAWB,\u201d his voice distorted to near-intelligibility. It\u2019s lines like this that keeps me coming back, even if I have to plunge a pickax through the arrangements to find them. Somehow, this line manages to feel both far-flung and claustrophobic, this small horror of navigating adult life: <i>I didn\u2019t know how to ask.<\/i><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">It\u2019s not all wolflike screams and shaking fists at the sky, however. At turns beautiful, at turns grating, \u201cPull\u201d begins with a haunting, lantern-light melody that sounds like Hardy is chastising someone for not letting him go while standing in their doorway. I secretly would kill for a fully acoustic version of this song (I literally had a dream about it) but have come to accept the plunge into crunchy guitars and screams that happens seconds after Hardy half-whispers <i>I can\u2019t do this again<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">\u201cHate TKO\u201d (See R&amp;B singer Teddy Pendergrass\u2019s 1980 hit \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/track\/37ap6nCrkAew8dPVsGj1QD?si=azqJWO2tTbK7cl0e4YhSjQ\">Love T.K.O.<\/a>\u201d for likely title inspiration, T.K.O. meaning \u201cTechnical Knock Out\u201d) also slides into a moment of strange softness \u2014 or, at least, a softness reminiscent of submersing yourself in white noise a la Eleven from <i>Stranger Things<\/i> \u2014 as a childlike, accented voice reminds us that we have an endless supply of love within us for anything we choose.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Album closer &#8220;Part of It&#8221; is a bit of a sleeper hit, tonally similar to their earliest work in the sense that Hardy has found himself perched between the false promise of religion and the dark pit of believing in nothing, still certain the latter is the lesser of two evils, but still pretty unhappy about it. <i>In a perfect world I don\u2019t think I would sing\/my voice would shrink in peaceful atrophy, <\/i>he muses, a killer line that genuinely pissed me off the first time I heard it, because I\u2019m almost sure I\u2019ll never write anything that good.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">While only time can determine if <i>Death is a Warm Blanket<\/i> will stitch itself into my musical tapestry the way <i>Much Love <\/i>so confidently did, I know that I\u2019m in it for the long haul with this band. If I wasn\u2019t willing to challenge my musical taste at all, I probably would never have taken the steps that led me to discover Microwave in the first place. And that would be ever so much further away from that perfect world.<\/p>\n<p><em>Microwave is on tour now. Follow them on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/microwavetheband\/\">Facebook<\/a> for ongoing updates.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s inevitable that your favorite bands will eventually release an album that challenges you in some way. Georgia band Microwave\u2019s newest release, Death is a Warm Blanket, is certainly one of those albums for me. Their 2016 LP, Much Love, a heartrending thirty minutes of beautifully written and arranged tracks lamenting the complexities of love, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":29455,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[573,202],"tags":[1251,5197,9030,5895,9039],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/48184538_1915907058517554_9091860992949747712_o.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29450"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29450"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29627,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29450\/revisions\/29627"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}