Image and music have long walked hand in hand, but in our internet-saturated world, the two are more intimately connected than ever before. Prior to the world wide web, before TV even, live performances and paraphernalia in the form of fliers, press releases, album covers and liner notes all shaped the public’s perception of a band and its music. But the internet has sparked a significant change.
In years past, few artists had the marketing muscle behind them to spread their image across the globe. Today, nearly every unsigned artist has a webpage and multiple social media accounts that do just that. Indeed, the internet, along with digital audio workstations, have democratized popular music to an extent previously unimaginable. However, the internet has also transformed every unsigned artist into their own “brand manager”—for better and for worse.
I mention this change because, after listening to Big, If True’s Top Text, what stayed with me was not a catchy lyric or melody—although both are there in abundance—but a sense of cognitive dissonance. The distance between the band’s comedic, tongue-in-cheek image, and its relatively straightforward punk-inspired pop-rock left me feeling unsettled, almost cheated.
On its Bandcamp page Big, if True claims the new EP, Top Text, was inspired by “the paintings of former President George W. Bush and L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics or whatever.” From these witty musings to the band’s hilarious “family portraits” on its Facebook and Bandcamp pages, I was expecting music that was equally transgressive.
Though an engagingly offbeat lyricism exists throughout (Targets in my brain / I never hit ’em like a high note) as a whole, Top Text is rather staid. The band is tight, and it’s got a knack for penning memorable melodies, but musically, it’s largely treading well-trodden ground.
Take the EP’s strongest track, “All You Can (Ch)eat Buffet.” The song is great, but with its heavy fuzz guitars and relentlessly catchy chorus, it sounds more like something Weezer would have made in the late ’90s than anything you’d expect from a band breaking out in 2019, especially a band whose extra-musical offerings seem so deliciously idiosyncratic.
For a few days, I’ve kept Top Text on repeat, and happily so. But when I turn the music off, I keep coming back to the promise of a band who cites the artistry of “W” and the pseudo-religious bunk of L. Ron Hubbard as inspiration. For me, it was a promise never quite fulfilled.
