The debut album from under-the-radar indie singer\/songwriter Justus Proffit is a brief, angsty, lo-fi power-pop effort that should put him on the map outside of his hometown.<\/p>\n
A 29-minute affair with only nine proper songs, the album details a difficult period in the singer\u2019s life and consequently flirts with self-pity territory, but Proffit\u2019s cool delivery and the brevity of the songs instead makes it relatable. Those moments in life when you\u2019ve felt alone or had a moment of self-pity due to a health circumstance or loss of a friend or a realization that your friends invited someone else and not you? Proffit has nailed that feeling but has the good sense not to dwell too much in it. Life goes on, right?<\/p>\n
\u201cSolidified\u201d is a good example of this, marrying a rather upbeat guitar track to lyrics of a verbally abusive man in one\u2019s life: \u201cWait until he\u2019s home \/ Yelling down your throat \u2026 \u201cDealing out the day \/ With bitter things to say \/ You once knew this man \/ But the dream is gone.\u201d It could be a father, or a husband (from the wife\u2019s point of view), but the pain is real. When Proffit sings \u201cTake me back to my childhood\u201d at the end, it\u2019s honest but not maudlin. Not easy to pull off.<\/p>\n
Less successful are \u201cYou\u201d and \u201cLaughing On The Inside,\u201d which fit the overall fabric but don\u2019t really stand out, and on balance there aren\u2019t a ton of terribly memorable moments that last. \u201cClosed View\u201d is a mystery, too, the one moment that actually seems produced and electric, and the rare moment where it\u2019s difficult to discern what the song is about: \u201cClosed view inside a room \/ When it feels you want to die \/ Go outside if it\u2019ll change your mind\u201d is pretty explicit about needing to move forward, but \u201cI\u2019ll kill your anything \/ Your everything that\u2019s true \/ Narcissist stared in the water till he drowned\u201d is a bit more of a mystery. Maybe that\u2019s the point?<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a hint of \u201890s lo-fi pop that runs through the tracks here; Proffit is often compared to Elliot Smith, and elements of a more melodic Pavement crop up too on some of the cuts. The sunny haze of \u201cPainted In The Sound\u201d and the more melancholic brood of \u201cShadow Of The Cross\u201d find Proffit discovering the twin poles of his sound. Both are great tracks, as is \u201cBig Room Melt Decay,\u201d where Proffit appears to explicitly address the deaths of his friends while contemplating his own mortality against a backdrop of chiming guitars and arresting chord changes. <\/p>\n
Proffitt plays all of the instruments here and wrote all the songs, and one feels that had this been released in the mid-\u201890s it would have been a beloved underground hit. But regardless of era, there\u2019s always people who will want to hear honest, unpretentious songs about universal moments, melancholy as those moments may be. A very good, uncompromising debut that sets the stage for something even better next time out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":33756,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[10337],"rating":[5615],"class_list":["post-45577","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-justus-proffit","rating-rating-b"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45577"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=45577"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=45577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}