Ladyfinger (ne)
Dusk
Saddle Creek
By Jose Fritz
It feels like Omaha is becoming the Seattle of a new era. It is inevitable that every musical movement, every renaissance be tied to a city; la ciudad de la rinascimento. The original renaissance movement was tied to Florence, this one to a former ferry crossing on the prairie. The word Omaha itself comes from Umanhan a Pawnee word meaning “dwellers on the bluff.” So there it is a bluff, a cliff, a precipice and Ladyfinger are looking over it.
As if making up for the sins of a previous record, Ladyfinger opens Dusk with a single 2/2 drum beat bass/snare, that pounds straight through the song, straight through each stanza and each chorus. It serves as an aural cleansing of the ears to wipe away all remaining trace of their first album Heavy Hands, which true to name was heavy handed and did the band a disservice. What went wrong back in 2006 I can’t guess. In the studio things can go wrong, or simply just not go right and a solid well-toured set can go the way of Green Magnet School and become solid gold sludge and die of nothing in particular.
Before you can possibly recover, the record tears into “ADD” with its tight-as-fuck rhythms overlain with strange broken guitar chords reminiscent of Burning Airlines. But the guitar wanking is kept to a bare minimum, the record is made from the same Lego building blocks as all the great arena rock bands in history. Even songs like “Let’s Get Married” are made of the same components. It is no gentle song of romance. No, it’s a manual transmission, 5th gear rocker. The topic, presumably sincere, is obliterated by the Life of Agony rhythm.
Ladyfinger waits only until the third track to drop the feel good hit of the summer, “Little Things.” Ethan Jones takes on the lyrics with a vice like an old man dying of ennui, melancholy and a loss of all hope.
“When do all the ugly memories go? / Before they have a chance to get close
They’re locked away in a broken home with all the little things you’ve had
When you told me that you need your space / I got the feeling you were just afraid
You set me free so I could take my place among the little thing that you had
I’m really sorry that your heart was broken / won’t fit together like it did before
But everybody’s gotta say that something’s wrong, that’s the bullshit that’s life.”
Then the meter downshifts from there, and from the left speaker the rhythm guitar plays a big dick pendulum swinging half time for a false start into the Squirrel Bait style power pop rest of the song. Jones wakes up from his melancholic intro and starts hollering that it’s all bullshit, that he doesn’t give a shit. I wish I was 18 again so I could feel less cynical about broken hearts, and play air guitar and enjoy giving the finger to total strangers from a moving car. The worst part of getting old isn’t forgetting things, it’s remembering how great that really was.
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