Release date: August 4th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Emo-y indie rock
Formats: Digital
There’s a moment in “Country Roads”, a song about Dylan Balliett’s complicated and activating relationship with his home state of West Virginia, where the Spirit Night frontman sings “Now I’m carrying with me /The rapid river / And the people it claimed / Who I can’t forget”. If I were choosing one lyric to distill Bury the Dead, I think it would have to be this one: we freeze on Balliett, very much still alive, but still incredibly conscious of and stuck on the memories of the people he’s outlived and the places he’s outran. Trailing out from this state of mind are the ten songs of Bury the Dead, an album that navigates a complicated tightrope soundtracked by the sounds of classic, spirited indie rock.
Spirit Night began in Shepherdstown, West Virginia in the early 2010s, with Balliett putting out three solid albums over a five-year period that culminated with Balliett moving to New York and joining emo titans The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die. The fourth Spirit Night album, Bury the Dead, comes eight years after 2015’s Shame, and six years after Balliett left The World Is a Beautiful Place after contributing to one album (2017’s underrated Always Foreign). Although a few of these songs have been kicking around for several years, the bulk of the recording for the album was done last year when Balliett returned to the Eastern Panhandle–specifically, to Jordan Hudkins of Rozwell Kid’s basement in Ranson, West Virginia, where Balliett, Hudkins, Ryan Hizer (Good Sport, Librarians), and Trey Curtis laid down what would become Bury the Dead.
Revisiting a place “fifteen minutes from [his] childhood home” is appropriate for the content of Bury the Dead–although “Country Roads” is the one song that explicitly grapples with his West Virginia upbringing (unless one counts the cover art, a photo depicting both the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah River), Balliett’s past is all over Bury the Dead. When discussing the influences for Bury the Dead (specifically, early 2000s Dischord and Saddle Creek Records bands), Balliett said “I wanted to make an album that would have saved my 17-year-old life,” and the content of the album makes it clear that the person who lived these events did, in fact, need the help of things like indie rock to make it to 2023.
Several songs on Bury the Dead are about people in Balliett’s life who did not survive, and the album takes an uncomfortably close look at death on multiple occasions. “In this life, ruin comes at random / While you’re smiling, laughing, with your closest friends,” Balliett sings in the painfully conflicted-sounding “Pulse”, and the five-minute album centerpiece “Different Bodies” addresses a friend who “gained [their] membership” to the 27 Club, with Balliett switching between “you” and “we” in his reminiscences.
There’s a contradiction at the heart of Bury the Dead–it’s an album made by the living, but one with a thorny relationship with the concept of “alive”. The opening track is called “Left Behind”, where Balliett says that he’s “came out the other side, awake and wide-eyed, with some storytelling scars,” but in the chorus he says “we’re all left behind”. Balliett’s heartbreaking dream at the center of “Different Bodies”–that he and his departed friend will meeting again “in different bodies, working different part-time jobs, with different hobbies” is just that, a dream. The dead that populate Bury the Dead are gone, while Balliett is still here–and as depression anthem “So Long” elucidates, the mere passage of time doesn’t automatically heal everything, and it’s not always so simple as being on “the other side” of past difficulties in one’s life.
Still, the Balliett of “So Long”, while sad, is not hopeless–“Change comes slowly and I’m still working toward a time / When I might feel fine,” he says, both acknowledging the long road to go and reaffirming a commitment to following it in one breath. It’s a tricky, complex thing to pull off, as the album’s other centerpiece (it can have two, it’s got an even number of tracks), “Any Way I Am”, also acknowledges. The song repeats its title like a mantra, discusses “acceptance”, and features Balliett watching sunsets and oceans, but it’s not so clean of an aural motivational poster as this would suggest–acceptance is “not [his] thing”, and the sunset and the ocean are on Balliett’s TV. Nevertheless, Balliett intently stares at the screen, allowing it to wash over him, finding reassurance in how small he is in comparison to such things.
Balliett’s lyrics are engrossing, but Bury the Dead wouldn’t work nearly as well if it wasn’t also accompanied by some pretty great music, driven purposefully by Balliett more intentionally diving back into the emo and punk music of his youth (although it’s not restrained by either of those genres, either). I’ve already written in-depth about how “Country Roads” both aces and expands upon the “hometown-hating pop punk song” trope, but there are several other impressive, “leveling-up” moments of pop songwriting on Bury the Dead, from the opening sprint of “Left Behind” to the bouncy power pop of “So Long” to “Angelica”, an incredibly interesting-sounding piece of noisy catchiness with a smooth chorus (it’s Spirit Night’s version of the “song with a girl’s name as the title”, which of course means it’s a song about loving someone who’s in a relationship with someone else, ending with Balliett shrugging and saying “These things happen all the time”).
The music accompanying closing track “Memorial Day” also elevates the song, in the way that it suddenly swells from its acoustic foundation to a crescendoing, orchestral emo-rocking conclusion as Balliett delivers the final lines. In the song’s first half, Balliett wonders aloud where he’d be if things had turned out differently, before resolving to “not worry about what’s already been set in stone”. Then the band kicks in, Dane Adelman’s trumpet joined by crashing drums, guitars, and “The Memorial Day Choir” (featuring Fred Thomas, Mo Troper, and Bertie, among others) as Balliett sings: “I can see us in the distance, rising from our beds / Climbing from the holes we dug, and burying the dead”. It’s in the distance, but it’s in sight.
Rosy Overdrive 