Koala Bar may have initially roped us in with echoes of mid-career Bon Iver and late-era The National, but with “This is a Car,” they’ve gone more inward, more insular.
The kind of music Koala Bar churns is counterpowering.
(I spun that yarn, yes, and I meant it as a kind of polar opposite to “overpowering,” and I’ll try to extrapolate further later.)
In the hands of lesser mortals, that yarn would easily turn to vapor. It would, without great consideration or engagement, be relegated to elevator muzak.
Instead, what we have – and are lucky to be alive for, in this very instant in hyperpolarizing, ultra-sensitized culture and history – is this: a class act that’s spiritedly averse to hysterics and histrionics.
What we have is the poetry of Koala Bar via their new EP, “This is a Car,” out via Lilystars Records today.
And if you know me, you know I’d be the last to drop the p-bomb (uh, “poetry”) in reviews. I think of it as an exalted form: forever a peak to peek at, dream of approaching, flirt with perhaps, but never quite achieve. As such, it’s more a creative state rather than a bar or level you ring up after you’ve secured all the power-up mushrooms along the 2-D/8-bit arcade road that is the artistic life.
What I’m trying to say is that Koala Bar is comfortable with that specific grind: the grind of pining for the exalted, the pining in itself its very own peak.
“Stare,” the opening track, is an existentialist gut-punch like no other. It says a lot without saying too much, its verse-chorus-verse economy laying the stage bare for the dread to be on full display. “The winds are fierce like as if god would care / A seat to breathe, a room to find my flare,” Alex Ploman sings, his delivery plaintive but with a tragic resolve.
In the background, the instrumentalists provide not just accompaniment but a sublime tapestry: a veiny, vulnerable, vaulting heart, as with the serene “Pheromone.” It’s a round song of regret and resignation, of mortality becoming part of the thick shared air above our heads. “Now when you’re older / Now when it’s over / Seasons they’ve all gone back to sleep,” the verses ebb and flow, the cyclical arpeggios a metaphor for time not so much freezing but ceasing to carry import.
“Meds” is singer-songwriter fare done right, its harmonies subtle and its accoutrements and strings unobtrusive: a self-soothing balm of a song that picks up without acting up and acting out. It’s beautiful and it’s all over too soon, like all the best things.
EP closer “Vigilance” is cut from the same cloth, but its rests and silences pray like petitions and plead like confessions. “Tell the vain, tell the anxious, they’re coveted / How to linger, to be still and unaware / To the ocean with the scent of holding on / To be older, to look after everyone,” it goes, and while it’s peppered with markers of pain, it remains simultaneously unfettered and unaffected.
Koala Bar may have initially roped me in with echoes of mid-career Bon Iver and late-era The National, but with “This is a Car,” they’ve gone more inward, more insular, and that’s the kind of space a lot of us would want to be in, I feel.
This “vacuum” that’s akin to being a “borderland between youth and adulthood” – as the band says in a pre-release statement – can be a scary place, but Koala Bar cautions us to exercise “vigilance,” but not the kind that “tricks you into feeling as if you don’t own your own life.”
To that end, “This is a Car” is Koala Bar, well, taking the wheel.