One Track Mind

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Although Poison Control Center claim the college town of Ames, Iowa as their home base, their latest album was borne of the time they spent apart as much as it was of coming together. Over the past couple years, the band’s four members all lived in different cities and worked on their sophomore effort by exchanging demos across the distance. By last May, the quartet had enough material kicking around to hunker down face to face and record Sad Sour Future, a 71 minute long treatise on those classic rock themes: love, loneliness, and death. Their music isn’t as gloomy as all that, though; the band is adept at phrasing their lyrical concerns within a framework of catchy, poppy indie-rock melodies which can prove hard to shake.

The third track on Sad Sour Future (which was released by Afternoon Records on May 18th) is the infectious “Being Gone,” a three and a half minute jaunt with an unassuming but addictive personality. In its more wild flashes of guitar there are shades of Pavement, with splashes of The Lucksmiths and The Wave Pictures in its sparse yet effective instrumentation, and more than a light dusting of the footloose, summery vibe of Free Energy to pull it all together. The song’s first lyric (“It’s not so easy breaking up today even though you’ve got it all planned out”) is a darkly comic riff on the old theme of “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” setting the tone for the rest of the jam. As “Being Gone” comes to a climax, falsetto vocals duke it out with organ and piano and saxophone in a shoulder-shaking fit you’ll want to relive repeatedly.