Releasing their second single in four years, Yarmouth’s Rain Over St. Ambrose remain habitually cryptic with “Drop.” The band have churned out a hit, with lyrics that might suggest a critical view of the current state of the pop music – taking some vague swipes at EDM. But what we’re really wondering is: what happened in 1998?
Produced by Cory LeBlanc, Rain Over St. Ambrose recorded with Thomas Stajcer (Joel Plaskett, Erin Costelo, Mo Kenney) of New Scotland Yard and had “Drop” mixed by Tony Doogan (Wintersleep, Mogwai, Belle and Sebastian) at the Castle of Doom in Glasgow, Scotland.
Maintaining their track record of keeping tight-lipped over what goes into their lyrics, it comes down to disassembling “Drop” to puzzle out its meaning:
“Crawl away, the fire drags you down,
Spreading all your ashes on the ground
It’s hard to say, when the fire comes around,
Hush from the crowd of sound
We made promises back in 1998,
And all the pretty little girls say,
‘When’s the drop gonna happen?’
I want to dance with my eyes closed,
View the world through someone else’s eyes
Fall away, I can’t take it anymore,
Clearing all your ashes from the floor,
It’s hard to say, when the sequence comes around,
Hush from the crowd of sound
We made promises back in 1998,
And all the pretty little girls say,
‘When’s the drop gonna happen?’
I want to dance with my eyes closed,
view the view world from someone else’s eyes
Free in time, hands up, hands up,
I’ve been waiting, waiting, for the bass to drop,
I’m all alone, together tonight,
If you look around you might say, rock and roll is dead,
Well I don’t listen anyway
And all the pretty little girls say
‘When’s the drop gonna happen?’
I want to dance with my eyes closed,
View the world from someone else’s eyes”
There’s a clear line suggesting the death or rock and roll, a claim that’s been made for decades and still occasionally proves to be false. But Rain Over St Ambrose seem to find themselves standing between two worlds: on the one side, the long-standing reign of guitar-powered rock, and on the other, a relatively new world of synthetic dance music.
In this case, does the ends justify the means? Has the evolution from rock to EDM irrevocably skipped a beat, or does it all amount to the same thing? If the end result is being able to lose yourself in the music, regardless of wild shifts in genres and tastes, does it matter if a performance is a prolonged hype-building lead-up towards the big “drop”? Or are we listening to apples and oranges that barely even deserve to be considered in the same category?
And what happened in 1998?