"The Rescue" by Search the City, Wednesday, July 20, 2022

 

If you play by the rules, you can win the game. At least that's what kids are told when they're growing up. But somewhere along the way, the tales of how it's supposed to be don't seem to match what's actually happening. The prophets who have gone before you have foretold of a golden age when life was easy. Just follow the formula. Of course, there is no formula for being in a rock band, and success is never a guarantee. But in the mid-'00s it seemed that being signed to Tooth & Nail Records was a guarantee into both Christian and mainstream markets. Tooth & Nail was a sure-shot, until it wasn't.

WE’LL START A FIRE SO BIG THE HEAVENS CAN SEE IT. Search the City in 2004 formed when two Michigan high school friends decided to make a band. Guitarist Alex Sheldon and drummer Adam McMillion were eventually joined by singer Josh Frost, guitarist James Czech, and bassist Eli Clark. After recording the EP Ghosts in 2008, the band signed to Tooth & Nail Records. Two songs from Ghosts ended up on the band's debut LP, A Fire So Big the Heavens Can See It, "Clocks and Timepieces" and "The Streetlight Diaries." A Fire So Big was a more refined version of the band's EP. Throughout the band's career, they made sugary power-pop songs. Taking inspiration from the overly clever wordsmiths of the genre like Relient K and Blink-182, the lyrics on A Fire So Big tend to be on the cheesy side. As the Labeled Podcast has pointed out on multiple occasions, Tooth & Nail bands at that time, particularly of the non-screaming persuasion, pop-punk bands looked to Anberlin as a rubric for success in the music business, and this often caused bands like Search the City to sound like imitators of Anberlin, and sometimes the reviews from sites like Jesusfreakshideout.com and Alternative Press could be brutal on music at the time. But the songs on the album still make me happy, even though they don't push musical boundaries.  

THE REASON I’M HOLDING MY BREATH EVERY NIGHT. The formula used to be simple: sell CDs, get plays on the radio, and sell tickets and merchandise on tour. No Meta/ByteDance/Spotify streaming numbers counted, but MySpace did help get the word out about a band's new album and tour dates. I saw Search the City at Cornerstone for Tooth & Nail Day, the day before the official festival began, in 2007 or 2008. It was an average show with the music not sounding in tune with Frost's vocals. I'm sure that there's a story to be told on Labeled, but there's still quite a few gaps in the information I could find on the band. The band disappeared from Tooth & Nail's roaster, but reemerged with a new lead singer, Travis Bobier, though that iteration of the band was also doomed (see yesterday's post). Today's song, "The Rescue" is the namesake of the band's debut album. The speaker in the song seems be talking to a person who is a victim of their bad decisions, hence he is "praying for the mistakes [that person] made." Somehow the singer is also in need of a rescue from something too, so he "hold[s his] breath every night."  And it is with that hope that I leave you, a hope for rescue. Hopefully, we don't have to build a fire so big the heavens can see it!

Read “The Rescue” by Search the City on Genius.