I love how Paul Cafcae manages to push his music toward recognizable sounds and styles, buffers up against their borders, but stops short of fully committing to its rules and regulations, thereby retaining his own… let’s call it Cafcaeness. He did it with “The Rider,” which was his own take on 50’s rock and roll balladry; he did it with “You Cannot Get To Heaven” as he skirted a sort of country-punk sound, and he is doing it again with his latest single, “Fresh Wind Blowing.”
This time out, he heads for the place where 60s garage rock spilled over into 70s punk, and this new one is a swirl of gnashing CBGB-infused one-chord guitar riffs (key changes don’t count), squalling sonics, short, sharp, and shockingly great solos, and a final descent into madness via off-kilter whistles.
But if the music is occasionally beguiling, the message is apposite, particularly given recent events. Although “Fresh Wind Blowing” was written before the US election, it has become even more poignant given the potentially unsympathetic, unfriendly, uninviting, entrenched, and troubled world that now faces us. For too long, the decent folk have put up with the powers-that-be ruling their lives, but even decent folk have a breaking point. Maybe the whole system needs to change – politics, media, business – everything, and it is perhaps time for us little folk, the silent majority, to become the vocal mainstream and make our voices heard.
And when you do, you already have a soundtrack, a rallying cry, a call to arms in the form of “Fresh Wind Blowing.”
Forget Kafka-esque; Cafcae-esque is where it’s at!
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