Dominic Angelella is a songwriter and musician born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. He currently plays bass for Lucy Dacus, has toured with Natalie Prass and MewithoutYou, and has played on records by Kendrick Lamar, Juicy J, Mac Miller, Hop Along, and more. In addition to his resumé as a touring and recording musician he releases records under his own name, most recently God Loves A Scammer.
(Photo Credit: Josh Pelta-Heller)
Think Differently, the debut album by NYC duo Callahan & Witscher, has been described online by various journalists as a musical mid-life crisis, the sound of two middle aged noise artists reckoning with their life choices as the industry becomes less and less sustainable with each passing year. With a casual listen, you might be forgiven for thinking this album was a work of RYM-baiting performance art by two elder millennials raised on The KLF and Googling, “What is Plunderphonics?” The album is laced with timely references, samples, and in-jokes. However, reviewers believing this album to be a purely cynical take-down of the industry are sorely mistaken. Underneath all the window-dressing, Think Differently is an incredibly sincere songwriter record, one that reckons with the beauty and stupidity of dedicating one’s life fully to the pursuit of music. To be unable to let go of a dream, no matter how detrimental it could be to your personal or professional life. You may break up the band, get a job, try to quit altogether, but the specter of the sound hangs above you forever, as a reminder of days gone by and everlasting devotion.
Woven throughout Think Differently are memories that may feel familiar to the average musician. Career highs, mortifying misadventures, and the vast mood swings that come along with touring. The ambient dread of going to a show and running into someone you’d rather not see. The promoter apologizing that more people weren’t there and then explaining that this is why he can’t pay your guarantee. It’s all here in the record, told with a candid vulnerability. In “Boiler Room,” the song’s narrator realizes with fear that his experimental music won’t be understood by the club’s attendees expecting a party. What was thought to be a career milestone ends up as a total embarrassment. He tries to minimize the sting by smugly exclaiming that the livestream is just “content for ad revenue” but the damage has been done. It is easy for an artist to minimize their own culpability in the Content Industrial Complex, but more difficult to just admit they wanted people to connect with their music. Elsewhere, a well-meaning critique of a friend’s new song at a party sets off a disagreement, which leads to many questions around the value of music. The narrator isn’t trying to be a jerk, he just wants to have a deeper conversation about the content of the song, like artists in other mediums do expertly. Which is better: to apply gatekeeping art-speak to the medium of music, or to just say, “sounds good, man,” and walk away, half-listening? Callahan & Witscher don’t have a definite answer for us, but they pose a question that many have asked themselves after reading a review they disagreed with or spoken to an over-intellectualized peer: “Who wants to talk about music anyway?”
Speaking of, no review of this record would be complete without talking about how it sounds. Think Differently is full of cultural signifiers: ‘90s guitars that sit somewhere between classic shoegaze and “My Own Worst Enemy”; blink and you’ll miss it samples from Roblox and Taco Bell commercials; AI-generated characters from Spongebob Squarepants and Family Guy doing a Kanye parody; a Cameo (paid for by a friend of the band) by a comedian viciously roasting them — “Oh, you do experimental music? You did the experiment. What’s the outcome? Oh, nobody like y’all stuff, dog.” It’s tempting to wave off Callahan & Witscher’s goofy and hyper-modern comedy as irony-poisoned pessimism, but songwriters have been employing this kind of humor to lampoon musical culture for decades. Listening to this album, I am reminded of Frank Zappa’s critiques of 1967’s rapidly curdling hippie culture in We’re Only In It For The Money, or Will Sheff’s eviscerating takedowns of rich kid singer-songwriters and lascivious predators in Okkervil River’s The Stage Names and The Stand-Ins. Like Think Differently, these albums work because amidst the genre-parody and goofy lyrics, there are meaningful declarations about the power of music, and an understanding that joy, love and community exists alongside opportunists and spectators.
The last song on Think Differently is an ode to Columbus, Ohio. More specifically, it’s about playing a show to 13 people in a Columbus laundromat and the array of emotions that arise during an experience such as this. Exhaustion, numbness, boredom. At some point, a fellow musician named Keiran says, “I don’t want to complain, but sometimes this lifestyle makes you feel like you’re insane.” It is hard for me to be objective about an album like this, because I have played Columbus, Ohio so many times, on the way to New York, or Chicago, and many times I have played shows for 13 people. Sometimes less. I have felt bored, angry, and tired in Columbus, and in many other cities. I have also forged life-long friendships with people I wouldn’t have otherwise met, felt elated from being lucky enough to travel and perform, and been turned on to so many different types of music. Though at first listen this album may seem like a contrarian mess, to me it is one of the most sincere portraits of what it is like to spend your time doing this dumb and wonderful thing, told with candor and humor. At times, putting your music into the world may make you feel like a jester in agony, but if you believe music is worth fighting for, it just might be enough to get you to keep going. Maybe.
