It's hard to imagine how many people have made the word 'mayday' their last. It's a word inherently filled with panic and dread, originally descending from the French m'aider-- literally "help me." It's certainly never a good thing to hear it coming over your radio, as it means death might be just around the corner for whoever's out there in the air or on the ocean calling it out.
The members of Mayday seem like an unlikely bunch to relate to a primarily nautical distress call, having spent the majority of their lives adrift in the oceans of grain that cover Nebraska and the rest of the Great Plains. But frontman Ted Stevens has always seemed to view life itself as a vast ocean that we're simply cast into-- forced to struggle against currents and undertow, not to mention all the sinister surprises lurking in the depths. During his tenure with breadbasket troubadours Lullaby for the Working Class, Stevens once referred to himself as a "pale white torso, complete with two struggling oars," and it only seems fitting that the imagery of that line should come to the fore in his latest project, as that's what Mayday's music largely seems to address.
Since Lullaby had their final cadence, Stevens has gone on to become the guitarist for southeast Nebraskan post-punks Cursive, and musically, Mayday falls somewhere in between his two other bands, occasionally utilizing the rhythmic push that makes Cursive's music so urgent, but using it mostly to support the grandly humble gestures and ramshackle navel-gazing that characterized Lullaby for the Working Class. His singing has come a long way since he first cracked and groaned his way through songs like "Show Me How the Robots Dance" half a decade ago. Though there are still some rough spots, he sounds more confident on the microphone these days, displaying his widest expressive range ever.
Old Blood fades in on "Cinquefoils," with a pulsing electronic rhythm that's almost enough to make you wonder if Stevens and co. haven't given over to Depeche Mode-styled synth-pop. The subtle, room-miked drums and banjo/guitar plucking that enter soon after, though, make it immediately clear that that isn't the case. It's simply a broadening of a sonic pallet that was already pretty broad, and it's impressively well-integrated.
It's followed by the gorgeous "Come Home," which moves gracefully from a slow ballad with male-female harmonies to a soaring climax. "I'm trying to remember where I went wrong/ I only want to talk you into coming back/ I won't even ask you where you've been/ Or who you've been staying with," Stevens sings, as though staring out his window, watching some memory of domestic bliss. After the second refrain, the tempo doubles and slide guitars rise up to meet the vocals as the song moves to its stratospheric heights before coming back down for one last plea of "Come home, babe."
"Captain" is an old school working-class lullaby complete with imagery of planes colliding with mountains and ships being tossed like toys in storms. "Lullaby for the Sleeping Elephant" plays off the old Canadian saying that being adjacent to the U.S. is like "sleeping next to an elephant," with its tale of parents sending their child off to war. The anguished bridge turns the plodding tempo into sludge with dark, distorted guitars as Stevens hollers as though relating his own son's plight.
The band takes ample opportunity to spread their wings wide on songs like the tense "Pilot," with its ominous opening line, "The pilot is tapping the gauges." The song moves from claustrophobic verses to gorgeous, violin-led instrumental passages that play foil to the ragged nerves of the lyrics. "Confession" drips with desert-fried guitar and loping, Latin-inflected rhythms that would feel right at home on a Pinetop Seven or Calexico record.
Most impressive, though, are the album's two suites, the meditative "Tone/Atone/Atonal" and the epic, twelve-minute closer "Temple/Temporary/Extempore/Tempo." "Tone" moves from a stark, minimal opening to tribal beats smothered with organ and smatterings of slide guitar, eventually building to a stormy ending. "Temple" is an epic in the true sense, blossoming from an opening salvo of drones and dissonance into a complex series of freely composed verses full of shifting rhythms and textures. It's the rare twelve-minute song that earns its full keep without tossing in anything unnecessary.
Mayday have put together an impressive debut that's exceedingly difficult to pigeonhole. Mike and AJ Mogis' recording is immaculate, yet dirty enough to make the sci-fi folk vibe work perfectly. Mayday have turned the desperate cry for help into a thing of fragile, spontaneous beauty, and the result is stunning.
