I won’t claim to be an expert on psychological behavior or really any of the nuances to it. For this particular instance, the operative “it” being response and how folks respond to, well, anything. The idea of “fight-or-flight” always stuck with me but perhaps in a paradigm unlike how most view it. We are subjected to so much influence, personal grafting of good and bad with inevitable emotional baggage. Inevitably we reject some of this (a little) and take other bits (a lot) of mass culture, irregularly. Whether it’s for ill or not doesn’t matter much to your psyche so much as whether you embrace the little strands you pick up from everywhere or not. Do you ebb through the proverbial reverberations of chaos theory or let the uncertainty eat you up, hesitant to accept that influence?
The strings and strands are evident in Standard Legal, where the pieces are grafted into loops and throbs in the form of Mercury, their debut EP, out June 8 (physically on Very Jazzed). In my “fight-or-flight” paradigm, Standard Legal broods in the gray, the middle-ground but only for a moment (or half) before lashing out, with throbbing beats closer to second guesses, loops like revisiting old questions. Introspection as a tool, before being flung at you with cavalier regard. There’s a post-punk edge to what Standard Legal spin but like their sound as a whole, it’s a trace; it’s a burnished shadow catching melismatics and psychedelia within its frame.
There’s no tepidity in the sound of Mercury. But uncertainty, or even doubt? There’s room for that. It just rolls off Standard Legal, flinging off with the ebb. This is the sound of reverberation, of a consuming urban pathos. And the best way of handling it? Eyes rolled up to the morass in the back of your skull, being carried with rhythm. A fight in its own sense.
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