Song of the Evening: "Faith"

See the rest of the Songs from this column's history HERE, and note that recent entries are making a concentrated effort to keep the word count down. This is a space for brief music thoughts, attached to a song worth thinking about.

"Faith"

Combat

from Stay Golden

2024

I have a rule that if two distinct members of the online musiophile community, be it friends or anonymous commenters, recommend an album to me, I'm going to download the album. I ended up with Combat's Stay Golden because of a comment on Stereogum somewhere that I read approximately 24 hours before Nate wrote about Combat on this very blog (the recommendations can be implicit). Maybe you have a similar rule, and maybe this blog post will move you to listen to the full album for yourself. It's a good system. This is how we connect, me and you. We share the music. We learn from each other.

A tangential question could be: what can we learn from the music itself? Nate was right to underline the young-people anxieties that run through the songs on here. I get PUP vibes, maybe their negativity mixed with the upbeat, frantic production of Origami Angel. But I don't think that "crisis" is what we can necessarily "learn" from this music. Can't learn something that you already know so well.

What I learn from "Faith"—or maybe more like, relearn—is how important it is to follow your passion in small ways. Sure, when you're younger, following your passion might involve pausing your entire life and hopping in a van to tour the country with your band (the way he describes it as "this Combat shit" is pretty endearing, all things considered). When you get older, your window for passions like this get smaller, but they don't disappear. Takes a good ripper like "Faith" to stay optimistic in this way, to keep on scribblin' blogging notes in the margins of work documents, and the like.