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“Gnome” is a tune about killer gnomes.
What I like about it, and in regards to the work of Charlottesville band Movies on Music usually, is its emotional realism. Songwriters Jonathan Teeter and Francis McKee collage inventory pictures from science fiction with snippets of on a regular basis speech, making tales set in another person’s dream of your hometown.
I talked with Teeter and Francis about writing for the band. Their solutions typically drifted away from reflecting on their very own course of to expressing admiration for his or her cowriter’s work.
Teeter: “I like melancholy stuff, I like stuff that has a starting center and finish, even when it doesn’t fairly make sense… and it’s really humorous, I don’t suppose I’ve ever met anyone else in Charlottesville who I might belief to jot down a tune for a band in addition to Francis.”
Francis: “Oh candy. I’ve by no means heard this earlier than.”
T: “Yeah, as a result of your songs are good, and I really feel just like the lyrics unusually are proper on par with what I’m doing –”
F: “They do match.”
T: ” – if not oftentimes higher –”
Francis, in a voice deep as graves: “Not true. We’re not enjoying that recreation.”
Francis noticed that when Teeter sends him concepts for a brand new tune, “I can hear quite a lot of totally different stuff, as a result of it’s very contemporary and new to me. So I’ve to potential barely restructure stuff. I feel it’s an excellent combine.” Their pleasure about one another’s writing appears central to their course of.
Movies on Music’s lyrics perch on the sting between the unimaginable and the on a regular basis.
“Gnome” works within the style of the suburban gothic, the place all people’s so invested of their efficiency of the American dream that they ignore the horrors underneath its floor. It’s a style well-explored in comics, movie, and fiction, however I don’t know of many people who find themselves telling these sorts of tales in tune. The horror found right here is that the neighbors would allow you to be eaten by gnomes earlier than they’d look away from their baseball recreation.
The lyrics construct as much as the couplet, “They need to let you know that you simply actually ought to, ought to, ought to / They need to eat you, you’ve been wanting good, good, good.” Thick on the bottom of this world are individuals desperate to let you know what you actually ought to do. The realism of the primary assertion prompts the listener to query which aspect of the road the second belongs to. Who’s hungry, the gnomes or the neighbors? Whose reward is a form of devouring?
Erin O’Hare’s bass offers a way of shifting shadows by which small, malevolent figures may lurk. Carolyn Duren’s keyboard tones look like intruders from a extra mystical dimension. Max Bollinger’s drumming provides the tune a sunny, inexorable momentum – he’s the voice of everybody on the town who says, “Gnomes? They’re simply garden ornaments, they don’t eat individuals. Relax, and get that blood away from me.”
I advised the Teeter/McKee songwriting crew that I like the best way their songs go away area for my very own creativeness to go to work. Flashes of scene, flashes of motion, dialogue with out rationalization. The writing doesn’t inform me every thing that occurs, or why.
“Leaves some gaps within the story,” Francis mentioned.
“Like a dream,” I steered.
“Or hopefully like a convoluted movie of kinds,” Teeter ventured.
“Gnome” is out now.
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