It's hard to shake the comparison at first: Bandit's "Losing in a Sense" owes its stylistic cues to Control-era Pedro the Lion, when David Bazan's righteous anger fueled some of his most satisfyingly damning work. Here, the ponderously plucked guitar strings form a minor chord progression and the drawn-out syllables are sung like a solemn hymn against a filmstrip's whirring clicks. But on Bandit's debut album, Of Life, the band takes that heavy-handed guitar and instead imbues the characters with yearning.
On "Losing in a Sense," Bandit stays the drama, that clicking filmstrip speeding into an identifiable beat as Angela Plake readies the ugly truth bomb that launches the band into a moody rocker: "I don't see things differently / The world promised me I'd be something new." Plake plays with her words in the moment following innocence lost, pleading, "I've been losing in a sense," a devastating realization that nothing's changed.
Of Life comes out Jan. 20 on Broken Circles.
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