“I’m waiting for the drugs to wear off / I’m waiting for the medicine to kick in/ I’m waiting for the summer to be endlessly promising again” sings 21 year old Oberlin, Ohio resident Meagan Day on album opener “Cathedral park”. Lyrics that recall Letting off the happiness-era bright eyes, talk-sung in a voice that sounds a lot like early Mirah, if not without its own distinct lilt; “I’m eternally splitting at the seems/with the way that my favorite singer sings/ with the feeling that the perfect sad song brings”.
The record opens with “cathedral park” (perhaps it’s strongest track) to the sound of catchy and upbeat ukulele accompanied by clever drum machine and digital hand claps. Its not mind blowingly inventive, but she works the electronic beat into the song with a level of success you rarely hear with most lo-fi-indie-pop-folk-myspace-based singer songwriters. Her lyrics here, remain accessible, while never failing to sound honest through that almost-tired-but-not-quite-ready-to-quit voice, its digs especially deep into itself as she hopelessly repeats “you are not better off alone” as the song comes to a close. The follow up track, “Rodeo” is almost as good, with it’s clumsy but infectious almost-off-meter verses and playful, if slightly unimaginative/slightly nonsensical chorus “If I had my own rodeo my own rodeo rodeo / you and me like a pop song on the radio on the radio”.”Poor student” delivers one of the more standout lyrics on the album “women who drink whiskey have sorrow heavy hearts / women who drink rum, their lives been quartered into parts, women who drink gin learn when it ends it never starts again/ I’ll have a whiskey please” but fails to do much more than that, offering an overly repetitive ukulele playing the same few notes in the background without any alteration for the entirety of the song.
This is where it starts to get rough. All the interest she earns from you during the first 3 songs she slowly throws away from here on out. all of the succeeding tracks sound really homogeneous, and it wears you out fast. “wash away” sounds like an outtake, running in at about 50 seconds, made up of her repeating “watch it wash wash away” on the beach where she tackles the cliche of throwing your possessions away into the ocean. “wild grasses” tries to throw drum machine back into the mix but fails to make it stick, with an awkward beat that’s far to quiet and tame to actually pull the song along with any sense of rhythm. “bandits” has a catchy enough ukulele rhythm, and some shining moments even if it sounds like all of her other ukulele rhythms, but its hampered by a bridge that sounds like an outright vocal blunder. “twenty sixty four kicks it up a bit with a much stronger melody and Blink-182-esque cutesy/romantic/overly nostalgic for middle school lyrics “you make me feel like im 13 again/and you’re the camp counselor with the stellar tan/my braces come with multi-colored rubber bands/and your boyfriend plays in an awesome band”. Everything stays the same until “My party” where she stops sounding like Mirah and starts sounding like Kimya Dawson, right down to the glockenspiel and whistle-chorus. “For kicks” ends up with the same problems as “wild grasses” except the beat here would probably be pretty catchy if you could actually hear it. Finally “superhighway” adds a refreshingly overdue baseline, but fails to make up for the lack of varied instrumentation on the rest of the album.
It’s not a bad album, but its one that definitely requires some patience to make it all the through to the end and could definitely benefit a lot from being fleshed out with extra instrumentation. If nothing else, Day shows a lot of potential here as a budding singer songwriter who’s not afraid to wear her influences on her sleeve. Here’s to hoping the next one hits it home.
Recommended tracks: Cathedral park / Rodeo / Twenty Sixty Four
you can download the album in full for free here
