“No Ordinary” by Anchor & Braille, Friday, June 24, 2022

 

The smoothest, easiest, most chill record by Anchor & Braille is titled Tension. The album was written and recorded before the pandemic but released in May 2020 in a time when the U.S. was still under the shock of job loss, fear, and illness both physical and mental. According to a podcast I listened to today, lead singer Stephen Christian thinks of a scene from a movie when writing his Anchor & Braille albums. Whereas Songs for the Late Night Drive Home literally described the dark yet enchanting movie scene in the title, Christian said that Tension was about those quiet moments in your room by yourself or with a loved one.

BY MYSELF, EYES WIDE CLOSED. The opening track to Tension claims "This ain't no ordinary love song." The song alludes to the early days of a romantic relationship, when late-night conversations with that person can keep you awake all night just fantasizing of all the possibilities of where that relationship can go. When Stephen Christian was promoting the album on RadioU in 2020, he claimed that, although the album doesn't make the listener feel tension or leave the listener in a tense state, each song includes tension. I've talked about how Aaron Marsh uses tension to make sappy love songs capture the attention of even the most skeptical listener. It's a technique that many pop stars fail to employ when they are in happy, stable relationships, and why the divorce or break up record is so much better received than the happy, stable-relationship record. The love song must have enough tension to keep the listener's attention. 

YOU ILLUMINATE THIS ROOM. But the tension in "No Ordinary" isn't only lyrical. The song opens with what kind of sounds like a cheesy '90s VHS tape introduction which leads into electronic drums. The drums in the song in the verse so irregular in the verse, almost fighting against the music.  While the song is probably modeled after Sade's 1992 album Love's opener "No Ordinary Love," to me, the end of the chorus sounds like Toby Mac's groovy song by the same name "No Ordinary Love" from his 2008 Black Eyed Peas-inspired Portable Sounds. By the ending chorus on today's song,  horns and a very early '90s sounding lead guitar adds a delicious longing to the song, and we want more as the guitar fades out at the end of the 4:17 song. Listeners could commit to another 30 seconds for the guitar to jam, and in a live setting we might get that satisfaction, but the tension of the album leaves us with longing and satisfaction. If we want more guitar solo, we're just going to have to listen to the song again, but we should listen to the rest of the record first. So, with the romantic, probably sexual tension, of the first song, we go on to experience more tensions within a relationship. 

Read the lyrics on Genius.