They say the key to creating great music is to take two steps to the left of whatever you’re familiar with. Our brains, the nifty little pattern recognizers they are, just gush with nostalgia-fuelled dopamine over the pop music of your formative years. Now imagine if you were to toss all that music into a blender and compress whatever came back out into an album. What you’d end up with is The Muddle and their debut album, Still Waiting on a Fix.
The appropriately named band bury deeply cryptic lyrics across an album that fits more nods to permanent wave bands than can fit in your car’s visor cd holder. At its core you’d expect to find Michael Stipe playing The Postal Service at a piano bar. Built on synths, but willing to stray off into banjos and sleigh bells, Still Waiting on a Fix shows creativity within cohesion, and still packs in the hooks.
If we’re perpetually associating ourselves with the music that got us through puberty, it’s not surprising that REM provides the inspirational backbone to the album. The Muddle‘s frontman Jeff Hennessy totes the album as a confused jumble of middle-aged despair with a theme of promise. Somehow it’s all held together with a prevailing Goidelic lilt.
“That describes our lives but also the project itself,” says Hennessy, referring to fellow bandmates Mark Adam and Nic D’Amato. “Some of it hopeful and some of it disappointment and heartbreak. All the songs deal with that in some way.
The songs come from shit in our fucked up middle-aged lives, but we’re a little cryptic about who we actually are because we don’t really want it to be age-specific like that. The hopeful ones too, like ‘Amazing,’ that’s for our kids, but it could be about anyone.”
While a mid-life crisis might not sound like a chart topper in theory, there’s something to be said for unfettered honesty in music. Thankfully, Still Waiting on a Fix comes across as the voice of someone well versed in life’s complexities and plot twists. “Amazing” does stand out, both for being upbeat and as the album’s A-Side winner. Grounded on the keys and balancing between D’Amato’s intricate bassline and a vocal counterpoint, “Amazing” feels like it came from the same factory as Buggles’ version of “Video Killed The Radio Star.”
In the category of singles though, “Invincible” fits that mold better than any other track with its high energy hubris-powered tale of Wonder Twins proportions that only vaguely hints at an unfortunate end. It is, however, immediately followed by “Solitude,” one of at least two songs on the album about drinking. While that’s hardly an uncommon theme for the musicians (and we know, we hang out with them, almost exclusively at bars), it comes as being far more poignant from Hennessy. The lyrical depth of the album, and constant back-and-forth leaves the impression of someone battling with upheaval of extreme highs and lows, but with the benefit of hindsight. It’d be bittersweet, if only it were more sweet.
Hennessy explains that Still Waiting on a Fix is intended as a genuine journey for the listener. They’ve crafted the album with the righteously traditional method of a start-to-finish listen, giving a sense of experiencing that turmoil firsthand.
“We deliberately made an album. Even though that concept is foreign to a lot of people now. There’s a theme to it and a sound and also some little concept-y things we threw in for people who still like albums.”
Still Waiting on a Fix blurs the lines between contemporary music and a decade that valued wearing your heart on your sleeve in a way that somehow remained intelligible. Drawing inspirations from The Police, U2, and Radiohead, it’s a bit of an anachronistic smorgasbord, with surprising consistency for all that. If you’re going to produce hits though, it never hurts to stand on the shoulders of giants.
The Muddle have yet to announce any upcoming shows, but hint that they may be touring sometime in the Spring.