The Minor Second released its full-length sophomore album, EvilOlive, in 2021 out of Music Row’s The Hit Pit, laboriously following the 2018 debut, Half Step, which raised such questions for the band as “has that guy on the wall been staring for a while?” and “did he try coke at that party?”
As for EvilOlive, vocalist Trevor Evans-Young mans the words as this release raises the questions “is this a concept album about modern, daily orthodox religious practices?” and “is this the partial musical diary of a marriage?”
All questions raised by The Minor Second’s catalogue remain open to interpretation.
EvilOlive wields a fluctuating variation of Talking Heads and The Smiths influences, adding nuances of dark punk that nod to Danzig. These, along with similarities to the vocal style of The National’s Matt Berninger, contribute to creating The Minor Second’s sound. Much like Half Step, EvilOlive has only a few topics as subject matter and track lengths average around three and a half minutes.
Pertaining to the Danzig-fication, The Minor Second—a band that cranked up in Murfreesboro back in 2006 as The Transcenders—gets a little sinister through this endeavor with a four-song suite starting with “Disdain,” where the template interchanges spooky Morrissey/Interpol with the gloomier sound, about a weary traveler pondering against folks’ night lives while, seemingly, on an Australian vacation weekend (honeymoon?).
In a pitchy, ghostly vocal over a brooding Smiths-cum-Bauhaus style, “Glory” describes an Old Testament-minded cyborg with a singularity phobia. The dark grunge continues on “Blasphemy.” Lyrically, it’s all over the place in its righteousness, but has got a hole in [its] chest that shoots out light / In this dark world / Leave[s] nothing to chance except the cut of [its] jib, with a first of two telling bridges (It’s got lights, girl).
Rounding out this suite, “Compound World” sounds a darkly punk-ified, teeny-pop love song sounding like somewhat of a satire of Rubber Soul’s “Girl” in its Morrissey/Berninger vocality, only, this time Morrissey and the backup vocalists are dead. Lyrically, “Compound World,” speaks to the dichotomy of love and annoyance in relationships and using one to get over the other.
The lightly harpsichord-tinged “Palindrome,” contains examples of palindromes only true fans of the wordplay create and endure, sounding right out of a linguist’s favorite campy B-horror film titled No Melon, No Lemon (or, off of a locally produced sophomore album titled EvilOlive).
A raw power guitar solo halfway through “Stunned by Time” transforms The Minor Second from mysteriously conceptual to amped entirely. It’s a hell of an outro for EvilOlive, leaving this listener slightly short of breath. It’s just a shame that waited to happen until halfway through the last song.
The Minor Second’s EvilOlive can be found across the icons at Pandora, Apple, Spotify or Bandcamp at theminorsecond.bandcamp.com. Limited hard copies are available on CD. Information concerning live shows is updated on the band’s Facebook site.
