The bedrooms in old, rented houses from Fairchild to South Lucas are held together by paint — layers upon layers of beiges and grays that do the semester’s tenants the courtesy of covering up mold colonies and mysterious stains. If those bedroom walls could talk through those layers of paint, they’d probably tell a story like Everything I Was, Burning Slow, the debut album from Iowa City band 24thankyou.
The album’s opener and, meaningfully, its title track is an establishing shot of one such bedroom. At first, the song is lo-fi and familiar, with lyrics that relate to the sorry state of the splintering door frame. But the composition is eventually engulfed in something ecstatic as the words “Everything I was, burning slow” become “Everything I want, black snow / Ebbs around my heels, forward, slow.”
The following songs are slathered with sounds sung, strummed, programmed, processed, captured, collaged. The DIY-style production, handled in-house by the band, globs on ambiance throughout the album, in part via room tone and environmental sound. A song written inside a parking ramp booth, naturally, features the clipped whir of the ticket machine outside the window; a song about issues with self-image, naturally, features the bustle of beautiful people in the Ped Mall.
Because the five members of 24thankyou — Emma Parker, Ethan Traugh, Michael Muhlena, Scott Griffin and Nick Wilkins — each do a bit everything on Everything I Was, Burning Slow, their songs sound like they’ve been done by a single set of hands. On “Interlude ii (Hooded),” a murky riff, an eerily reverbed vocal track, a sample of the artificial chicken separator in a friend’s TikTok feed and an ecosystem in somebody’s backyard complement one another to almost organic effect, like a 2 a.m. hang happened to have the soundtrack of an Apple Store.
These by-all-means compositions, scribbled with indie-adjacent elements, are along the lines of Alex G’s makeshift ditties (which can still only be streamed on Bandcamp). But more than anything, the contrast between the band’s voracious production sensibilities and introspective subject matter feels like a late ’90s/early ’00s release on Saddle Creek Records, when the Platonic ideal of indie (at least at the time) began to draw influence from The Faint, featuring little moments of “whoa” in songs by Bright Eyes, Azure Ray, etc.
Everything I Was, Burning Slow returns to the bedroom in that old, rented house for “I Washed It Out,” the album’s aptly titled cleanse of a closer. The track’s lived-in room tone has had its hums mic’d and amplified, and amplified some more, to the foreground of instruments and voices. And yeah, you can hear the beiges and grays and just how much took place in between.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s August 2023 issue.
