Music Review // Andrew Spice "Rage Stage"

 

If you really wanted to, you could spend an entire book reading about why anger is both good and bad for you.  It's one of those things where it feels like a false feeling- like maybe your anger is just derived from fear- but then at the same time, if you don't get it out then you're likely to have even worse problems.  As it relates to this song though, I'm going to say that your anger is sometimes needed and you'll find that when you are in the "Rage Stage",

Andrew Spice begins this song with these dark guitars which feel like something from that early 2000s metal era of sound, maybe even going back to the late 1990's.   The guitars alone remind me of POD, while I also hear elements of bands such as Incubus and Linkin Park.  This ie perhaps most interesting because as the song builds to the chorus it becomes more melodic and dreamy, like a shoegaze song would, and given the subject matter of rage I was really expecting it to kick in much heavier.  

Lyrics which are in this song which might be expected say things like: "I'm in my rage stage / Don't care to find my grace".   But there is this one long verse that I'm not how it is even turned into music because of words in it (like "personal interests" and "include but are not limited to") which says: "You treat people like they're disposable / The moment they're not serving your personal interests / Which include but are not limited to keeping up with the joneses / And I learned that's incompatible with my trauma and my queerness".

This is a good time to get mad.  It's a good time to look at the world, see what is going wrong and say we've had enough.  The biggest thing about anger is how you use it.  If you disrupt the system by doing something that gets you in jail, you might be doing more harm than good.  But if you do something that can make change, then your anger will be used in the right way.  It feels almost impossible not to get angry at the world, but this song is a great way to be reminded that you can use that anger in a positive way.