The Faintest Ideas - 2006 - What Goes Up Must Calm Down

Magic Marker Records – MMR036

 The title is both a joke and an operating instruction. What Goes Up Must Calm Down spends most of its brief running time rushing forward on rattling drums, thin bright guitars, shouted melodies and the feeling that every song must get its entire life lived before somebody pulls the plug. The Faintest Ideas had begun in Gothenburg as Javelins, and even after changing names they retained something projectile in their music: songs are aimed, released and usually gone within two minutes. Fifteen of them fit here without the album feeling crowded because the group wastes almost nothing. Introductions barely exist, solos arrive as flashes of feedback, and choruses often sound less composed than discovered by four people colliding with the same idea at once.

Calling this twee would miss the grit under its fingernails. The melodies belong to indie pop, but the playing carries punk’s impatience and lo-fi recording preserves every useful rough edge. “You’re Beautiful” turns a love song into a sixty-second emergency, while “Dear Leibniz,” “Capitol Between Brackets” and “All Stars” keep finding hooks inside guitar sounds that seem one hard strum away from disintegration. Martin Cannert’s drums do not merely keep time; they chase the songs toward their exits. Joel Görsch’s bass gives the blur a spine, while Christoffer Lärkner and Daniel Svanhög trade guitars and vocals in a way that makes individual authorship feel less important than the collective racket. The uneven clarity and shifting vocal levels become part of the record’s character. Rather than polishing every track into one standardized surface, the album lets each song arrive carrying the weather of the room in which it was made.

That looseness does not mean the writing is careless. “Dexter’s Got a Sinister Heart” stacks voices around a melody strong enough to survive the surrounding clatter, and “Nosebleeders on the Track” turns nervous rhythm guitar into forward propulsion without sanding away its awkwardness. “Everything Is Black,” “Gun Totin’ Hooligans” and “Decapitated” reveal how much melancholy is concealed inside the speed. The guitars may chatter and the drums may tumble, but the voices frequently sound disappointed, worried or emotionally stranded. This friction is the album’s real engine: exhilaration and defeat occupy the same small room, each trying to shout over the other. Even the funny titles carry a defensive intelligence, using wordplay to keep heavier feelings from standing still long enough to become sentimental.

Then “Lose the Downside” obeys the album title and allows everything to settle. The tempo drops, the guitar begins to jangle rather than slash, and the accumulated commotion leaves behind a surprisingly tender afterimage. It proves that the preceding speed was never an inability to slow down; it was a chosen way of compressing thought, humor, anxiety and affection into the shortest possible transmission. The Faintest Ideas understood that small songs need not contain small ideas. These tracks behave like hurried notes passed across a classroom, scrawled quickly because discovery would be disastrous, yet each contains enough personality to open an entire private world. Life may feel long and tedious, as Daniel Svanhög once observed, but short songs can punch tiny windows through it.