If you’re a student or not, you can relate to the experience of hoping for a good night out and getting one. This record epitomizes that feeling, expectation and reality meeting. It’s solid through and through, like a good concrete wall or that open tub of ice cream you’ve found at the bottom of your freezer from months ago.
As the angst-ridden teen sits in the coffee shop longingly reading their book, longing for the freedom that the main antagonist has, they take a sip of their Indian filter coffee and glance blissfully out of the window at the autumn leaves blowing past, fantasising about what the rest of the night holds for them.
That night the same individual puts on their old corduroys and their baggiest shirt as their friends flood the halls of their student flat filling their emptiness with beers and other assorted chemicals before they set out for the humdrum club, soon to be uplifted into a frenzy of sweaty teens shaking off the grudge laid on their shoulders by the ever-present ‘Man’.
They head through the town with a headful of hopes and dreams of what may come of the night, as the club fills the crowd become more restless until the band clatter upon the stage with vigorous energy. The opening chords start to Awestruck and the teens are just that, awestruck.
The band proceed to follow the order of the albums of highs and lows, laying down a pleasant band of funk-filled beats and angry lyric’s claiming that nobody can ever be enough for anyone that they pine for. The crowd throw their arms around as the sweat flies across the room, followed by the golden ales poured by the underage bar staff who also find themselves in the trance of the music. There’s an environment of uncertainty and a wanting to certify the uncertainty.
As the penultimate song ‘Azkaban’ starts playing the teens know the gig will soon be coming to an end so they give it their all just as the band seemed to have writing the song itself. The themes of imprisonment are what all teens feel in one way or another, be it education, work, parental constrictions or even just life in it’s most humdrum sense. As the crowd begin to thin out the slow closer sets in, with no built-up emotions left they are left worn out and ready to paint the town red with the metaphorical blood or the bourgeoisie. We are all students at heart, learning to live.
Haiku Review
Playfully angsty,
Very original stuff,
Not a single fault
Listen to Twen on Spotify and Apple Music.
