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😄 gum / race to the air review

😄 gum / race to the air review

let's go? let's go

Connor Weir
June 20, 2023

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genre: shoegaze /// indie
release date: 29/05/23
runtime: 5:56
video: yes

good morning gang and welcome to another, what im sure is absolutely banging, edition of a single song review. i’ve been having a great time vibing to this track, and i think you will too! we’re firmly in the lo-fi indie and shoegaze adjacent world this week, with the song race to the air by gum. come for the gorgeous drums, stay for the energy, enjoy the vocals, i sure have.

click the picture up above to give it a listen!

what i liked! :)

this song is gorgeous. from the fuzzy and bassy rhythmn section to the crisp snare nothing is left to chance. the washy synth and distant strings give this song more oomph than a bulldozer, and it is not shy about using it. this is very much a song that you feel as much as you listen to it. also the degree to which this song keeps reinventing itself is so aggressively cool i feel bad writing about it as though i’m giving away spoilers. i don’t often recommend a dry listen but also here i am listening and feeling my mouth dry because the solos are so sick. on top of that, the sheer quantities of tone in this are something to behold. not one note in this song is devoid of a sense of particualr craftsmanship that you only really experience in some of the biggest aaa artists that it honestly makes me scratch my head at how this song is not blowing up rn.

what i didn’t like :(

so while i got absolutely lost in this song, and it was awesome, i will so being unable to signpost my way around it via classical song structure, or even the allusions to it, was a bit of a drag. i really enjoyed how good this song felt on the first few listens, but i also longed for being able to at least predict where we were goign to go. maybe i’m just a weeb on that front, idk.

for fans of

sorry gang, i am going to point to tame impala and say this song sounds like tame impala, it is very much in that vein. that said, this is doing what tame impala doesn’t, and refuses to adhere to some long standing structural ideas, and i think that’s cool.

should you listen to more?

i’m going to be real with you gang. this band has a song with ambrose kenny-smith of king gizzard fame and i owe that man at least one, perhaps two, of my kidneys. he’s a king, this artist rock and together they produce a song that has me boppin like nobodoes business.