Stream: The Lonely Wild, ‘Holidays’

Kevin Bronson on November 11th, 2014

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The Lonely Wild’s debut long-player “The Sun As It Comes” was filled with the kind of vein-bulging anthems about emotional duress and social upheaval that somehow made you feel better about the said conditions after you heard them. The quintet – Andrew Carroll, Jessi Williams, Andrew Schneider, Dave Farina and Ryan Ross – addresses different neuroses on their new single “Holidays”: the onset of the holiday season. “Every year we’re bombarded with baby boomer-era Christmas carols and jingles that paint a superficial portrait of what the holidays are,” the band said. “When we wrote ‘Holidays,’ we wanted to show the other side – the emotional fatigue, the pressure to be with estranged family, and the anxiety that mounts at the end of the year when we start to ask ourselves: Were you successful? What do you have to show for yourself?” Absent much of the country-rock flavor of their full-length, the Lonely Wild here provide catharsis in two movements: a dreamy opening four minutes that segues into Schneider getting his ya-ya’s out in a shredding solo outro. Take that, shoppers.

||| Stream: “Holidays”