David Navarro, April 9, 2016, at 9:00 p.m.
Double Experience, a Canadian rock trio with a nerd culture focus, drops its third album tomorrow, Unsaved Progress, and it’s a mix of one part 2000’s rock, and one part nerd culture. Over a handful of listens of Unsaved Progress, I’ve been reminded of Fall Out Boy, Queens of the Stone Age, and even a little Coheed and Cambria, all while still maintaining an aesthetic that feels wholly unique perhaps entirely due to their lyrical subject matter.
Take for instance the track “Godzilla,” which tells the brief tale of the classic monster. It’s a track that immediately reminded me of rock legends Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.” “Godzilla” embodies that same peculiar rock style of just rocking out and telling the story of a monster. Sure, we can sit back and take apart “Iron Man” and study what it could mean on a deeper level, and similarly there’s a lot to the “Godzilla” line, “History shows again and again / How nature points out the folly of men,” but the point of these songs isn’t to dissect and digest, it’s to rock out and sing a little nonsense about a monster.
Even their intro track “S O F I Ne” has some silliness to its lyrics. It’s a track that rocks and jams for a few minutes, but if you pay attention to the lyrics, there’s a funny little oddity. Take the following lines,
You’re lit gunpowder
I couldn’t breathe without you
Rocket fuel and iodine
A thousand neon lights
Gunpowder – Sulfur, Couldn’t breathe – Oxygen, Rocket fuel (this one is a little loose, but we’ll it to them) – Flourine, Iodine – Iodine, and Neon lights – Ne, or in other words, “S O F I Ne.” That’s a clever little detail that you wouldn’t get immediately, but once you get it, the whole song becomes a little funny.
Personally, when I sit down with a new album, or a new band, or even a new single, what I’m looking for is that moment when it clicks that this artist “gets it,” whatever it is that they need to get. For some bands it’s their genre’s styling, for other bands it’s a handful of lyrics that tell me that these are real people with real struggles. For Double Experience, that moment was when I realized that these guys are masters of the fun jam. Strip away the pretense, the depth, and just lose yourself in a little air guitar and nonsense. This is double experience.