No Connection

No Control

No Connection by Narc Twain

"Just want to try and sneak one more in before the year is over."

This track is actually so freaking cool, dude! Thanks for sharing.

We're looking at a guitar-led indie rock song. There's, like, a five minute instrumental interlude from about 2:40 to 8:00, (they call it the 'jam' section) which I usually wouldn't like, but I can get behind it in this case because it gives you time to ruminate on the lyrics of the track.

The first line drops the name "Michael Hastings." He's the journalist who died under somewhat unusual - some might say strange - circumstances in 2003.

As it says in No Connection, Hastings was only 33 when he died in a car crash. Technically, they way there was no foul play, but there's a bit of a conspiracy theory that his high-speed collision with a palm tree wasn't an accident at all, but rather a "car cyber attack."

Colleagues, friends, and some family reported that Hastings had been saying he was "onto a big story" in the weeks leading up to the incident, and he even stated that he believed he was being investigated by the FBI the day before he died.

(Not even gonna lie, I just learned all of that information 5 minutes ago from Wikipedia.)

I'm tempted to pass it off as histrionic nonsense, but that would be going against the very essence of the song that brought the incident to my attention. There's no connection; stop paying attention.

You can do some really highly destructive things now, through hacking a car, and it’s not that hard. So if there were a cyber attack on the car—and I’m not saying there was—I think whoever did it would probably get away with it. (source)

Wow, dude, I made myself paranoid.

After getting wayyyyy too deep into the Michael Hastings information, I returned to the song and it sounded even better. That intro is gold, with the creepy, sparse plucking of the guitar and then the one word opening: strange...

The frontman of Narc Twain, Tommy Siegel, describes his own voice as "naturally very earnest and nasal" (x), and it's a perfect fit for the tense atmosphere throughout the song and especially in the first verse.

Despite the weightiness of the topic being discussed, however, the track strikes a nice balance between genuine suspicion and...let's call it playfulness. I've been quoting from this interview where Siegel says they would never allow a band called "Narc Twain" to take itself too seriously.

I'd call this track a success.

Overview:

Genre:
Indie Rock

Favorite Lyrics:
strange

Verdict:
Literally why did I keep this as a category? I have never and will never say anything of value for the "verdict" portion of these entries.