Saturday, September 5, 2015

Food Flavored Song: Dinner Date by Diet Cig

There are moments in life when you get totally blindsided, have no idea what hit you and wind up being forever changed because of it. There are other moments where that same sort of situation takes place but the change that occurs doesn't last a long time. I don't have any idea where Father/Daughter Records fits into all of this but as far as the what have you done for me recently goes (I'm using recently loosely, like in the last month) it has pretty much blown my mind and caused me to revisit the Tender of years past.

First, PWR BTTM's "Ugly Cherries" came around and made me feel nostalgic for the early 2000's. For those of you who lived it, you know it was a simpler time, one where terrorists lurked in every back alley and George W. Bush spoke nightly about purchasing ugly fruit so that the "axis of evil" would not win. From there I moved back another decade thanks to Diet Cig and their track "Dinner Date." Because of this song, I yearned for the 90's when pop punk, meatballs, Thanksgiving turkey with grandma and mother's who insisted that you don't eat your vegetables unless they are canned were all the rage. Looking back, it is no wonder I existed in a world of such anger.

"Dinner Date" is bratty with overly sweetened emo-like sentimentality. It speaks in unique tongues, like when rotting friendships are compared to a motherly order to not purchase vegetables or when lame fathers are to be blamed for a lack of desire to slow dance or when the taste of turkey is compared to shit talking. These lyrical examples all help foster one of the blatant themes present in "Dinner Date," familial let downs. You know it's bad when everyone in a hospital feels more like a relative than your own flesh and blood. Of course that could be just the teen angst talking again. But for Alex Luciano, and fifteen year old Tender Branson, it sure as hell felt like that. What really makes "Dinner Date" work, and what helps set it apart from a lot of its pop punk predecessors, is the intimacy of the track. I don't get the feeling that Alex is trying to keep me at a distance with the lyrics that she is dropping. I think she is, in her own odd way, letting me take a small peek at those things that have shaped her understanding of what it means to be family. If I'm wrong and "Dinner Date" is all for show, then I have to commend Alex for her convincing presentation.

"Dinner Date" is part of a 7 inch split that will be released on September 18th via Father/Daughter Records and Art is Hard Records.



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