'For Their Love' Review: Other Lives' new album is as cryptically dark as it is lush, bright and pensive
Other Lives are set to release their new album on April 24, titled 'For Their Love', through Play It Again Sam and ATO Records. With the new studio LP's release, the band will be launching an AMA session (dubbed Indieheads AMA) for fans on Reddit at 11am PST / 2pm EST / 7pm BST.
Hailing from Stillwater, Oklahoma, the indie rock band consists of members Jesse Tabish (lead vocals, piano, guitar), Jonathon Mooney (piano, violin, guitar, percussion, trumpet) and Josh Onstott (bass, keys, percussion, guitar, backing vocals), according to their Facebook page.
Originally formed under the name Kunek in 2004, they released their Other Lives self-titled debut in 2009. Their 2011 LP 'Tamer Animals' garnered them well-received critical reviews and Thom Yorke's supergroup Atoms for Peace rendered a remix of its title track in 2012. On their 2012 North American tour in support of 'Tamer Animals', the band opened for Radiohead and also played Coachella Festival that same year.
'For Their Love' follows their 2015 album 'Rituals'. Take your bluesy acid-rock trips of The Doors, add in your dreamy Fleet Foxes meditation and the eerie string-crescendoed hysteria of Radiohead, and you may get a clearer idea of the sound of 'For Their Love'.
'Sound of Violence', the album's opening track unveils the pace for the LP. In a sort of beaten-up cowboy's slump through the gates of heaven, Tabbish sings, "Make some room for the afterlife. Golden gates, a happy wife. Nothing compares to the sound of your violence. Great destroyer, you plant the seed. Live in guilt and the loser's grief. But nothing compares to the sound of their violence." The song portrays a sense of lethargic bliss as you take a sarcastic jab at the entity that made you tired.
On 'All Eyes/For Their Love' we hear a throwback to the theme from 'The Love Boat' (1976) series. The track reveals a lushly-crafted mix of instruments with a choir of female vocals chiming in this love story, although it ain't your usual romantic number. As optimistic as the music comes across, the lyrics reveal a dark suggestion. We see a cryptic message emerge referring to "the shadow" of "many forms" that keeps "all eyes" on you as you are reminded to rectify yourself before seeking out "their love." In a similar sense to the song's title, Tabish also furthers the dualism, "Don't you think they'll be amused. By your love?".
'Nites Out' gets a different musical texture to the rest of the album's Americana/folk-tinged songs. Blending a gothic extravaganza and '80s new wave, we see Tabish facing his inner pain. He sings, "Sit around 'til the morning reigns. It's the fade of the hour, it's a trap. I hear you now are you talking to me? You know exactly the kind we are, if you say so." Challenging his inner demons, he sings, "Exit out now, release me."
With only a few lines to tell its story, 'Who's Gonna Love Us' comes off as one of the more personal songs on the album. Opening with a trilled-piano melody on the piano, the song uses its background instruments toward a gradually elevating shrill of emotions. In reminiscence of a thorny Radiohead song, strings shriek and shimmer at the song's closing moments with lyrics "Who's gonna love you?" sung in repeat that would pair well in theme to 'All Eyes/For Their Love'.