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No One Was Driving The Car finds LA DISPUTE staring down existential dread with disillusionment at the modern world. The tumultuous aspects of modern society and the fear of losing control all come to a head, and their response is to offer a narrative journey through five acts. LA DISPUTE lean into the cinematic for this journey, taking the 2017 film First Reformed as a direct influence. Meandering images act as abstract metaphors for deeper anxieties, and offer a compelling spin on their signature lyrical style. Its title is a reference to a headline frontman Jordan Dreyer read about a self-driving car crashing in a cul de sac and killing all of the passengers – an apt summation of the dystopian world that characterises this narrative.
The first act opens the album on a night in crisis, with the opening track, I Shaved My Head, setting the tone for the album. It fuses confrontational, prosaic and meandering lyricism with building guitar grooves and forceful drum parts. Following track Man With Hands And Ankles Bound picks this groove up and introduces the cinematic themes to the album’s lyrical world. Songs pan out like screenplays, bridging across the album to later tracks such as the brutal Top-Sellers Banquet and its positioning as a camera navigating a morbid scene in the surveillance age.
The second act is the stand alone song Environmental Catastrophe Film, which acts as a thematic core for the album. Self belief is tied to the city and how it changes over time, and the track feels like the first time since the albums start that you can catch your breath. Only for a moment though, as intimate, quiet musings on the natural world swirl out into a desperate explosion of noise and existential grapplings with change, faith, and mortality.
This emotional weight lingers in every corner of No One Was Driving The Car. As the album’s third act takes place, each track becomes burdened by its own contemplative spirals. Vignettes emerge from tracks like The Field, but it is not until Steve that the music and the lyrics work together to elevate out of this fog of heaviness. Big drums and an aggressive force behind the vocals propel the song forwards, and the hook shines out and enables the emotional core to resonate as opposed to encumber.
The fourth act laces together the album’s cinematic and conceptual peak in Top-Sellers Banquet, and then leans into more melodic paces in Saturation Diver and I Dreamt Of A Room With All My Friends I Could Not Get In. Pulling the album into its conclusion, in its fifth and final act, LA DISPUTE offer a respite with acoustic moments in the title track and End Times Sermon. There is a sense of clarity that emerges from the haze, as the question “did we get what we wanted, did we get what we deserved?” is posed.
This abstract meandering and cinematic sense is deeply compelling, and LA DISPUTE have delivered a multi-layered conceptual piece with No One Was Driving The Car. Each act is a poignant culmination of each anxiety that looms over the album, but delivered all together No One Was Driving The Car can be an exhausting listen at times. It was clearly never meant to be an easy one, but the weight of its abstractions takes over the album and often gets stuck in its own world. In the moments, however, where it lifts out of itself, LA DISPUTE find something really special, offering a deeply human, if ephemeral, perspective on existential dread and existing in the modern world.
Rating: 7/10
No One Was Driving The Car is set for release September 5th via Epitaph.
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The post ALBUM REVIEW: No One Was Driving The Car – La Dispute appeared first on Distorted Sound Magazine.
