Windsor for the Derby - We Fight 'Til Death
(Secretly Canadian)
It’s rare when an indie band is around long enough that their existence spans a significant portion of one’s life. Given the nature of indie music and it’s mostly bleak financial potential bands rarely last more than a few years before the members decide they’re too old, too poor, or too tired to keep playing in a rock ‘n roll band. Dan Matz and Jason McNeely, however, have been steadfast in their efforts to keep Windsor for the Derby a mainstay in the indie rock world since their first releases nearly a decade ago. While Windsor for the Derby was never atop the list of my favorite bands they’ve been consistently releasing albums every few years that were always among the best in the spacey/drone rock niche, having developed a unique style that showed us ambient music could be made without the use of a delay pedal. Though droning was the band’s bread and butter, even more exciting than the spacious Minnie Greunzfeldt or Calm Hades Float, however, was 2002’s Emotional Rescue, a record that found Matz and McNeely leaning more towards pop songs than drawn out ambient jams while still maintaining a clear association with their earlier sound. It was, to be certain, their best record and left me wondering if they would ever stop getting better. At last, two long years later, the question has been answered.
After We Fight ‘Til Death opens with the lone great song “Melody of a Fallen Tree” things immediately turn to disaster. The album’s second track, “Nightingale” is a disgrace with limp and pointless vocals and one of the most banal guitar parts I’ve ever heard is only the first in an endless string of platitudes from a once great band. In the past when Windsor for the Derby wrote repetitive songs they always created an amazing space, one that you were happy to be in despite the fact that it was static and directionless. That was one of the great things about Windsor for the Derby, that on the surface they seemed so tedious but were in fact making really interesting music.
We Fight ‘Til Death sounds as though it were made with total indifference, giving little to no care for the sounds whatsoever. Most of the time the music resembles a jam band on autopilot rather than the careful purveyors of intricate guitar work, thoughtful instrumentation, and clever melodies the band once utilized with such ease. There is no subtlety, no craft. “Spring Like Sixty” and others feature horribly mundane synth playing, “The Door is Red” sounds like a reject from “Minnie Greunzfeldt”, and “For People Unknown” is an almost exact replica of Wilco’s embarrassment of a song, “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” from earlier this year (though at least Windsor for the Derby had the good sense to end their song well before the ten-minute mark). Even a potentially promising track like “Black Coats” is foiled by flaccid singing of uninspired lyrics and clichéd instrumentation that the band had always avoided in the past.
It’s hard to imagine what Matz and McNeely were thinking when they turned this record in to the label. From start to finish the band sounds like they’re about to fall out of their chairs from the apparent boredom they feel towards the music they’re playing. Each song begins and ends and each time I’m left thinking, “What in the hell is the point of all this?” With the penultimate title track the band makes a last ditch effort to show some sense that maybe they do care about what they’re doing, but after 40 minutes of garbage four minutes of rousing drums and distorted guitars can’t offer much more than a feeling of “too little, too late”. I wanted so badly to be kind to this record but the music just won’t allow it. We Fight ‘Til Death should have been one of the year’s best but, sadly, reality is much less promising.
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