Animal Flag & Plainview "Things That Keep Us Up At Night"

[[Name Your Price Download // https://animalflag.bandcamp.com/album/things-that-keep-us-up-at-night]]

After reviewing two Animal Flag albums previously, I find myself listening to this split EP and only really thinking about how Animal Flag has acoustic based songs and electric based ones as well, yet whatever comes into my mind never really seems to matter anymore as Animal Flag has become its own entity to me.

It makes a great deal of sense since I've been hearing Animal Flag in other artists for quite some time now (and making note of it in the appropriate reviews)    That distinctive voice that I once tried to place just sounds like Animal Flag to me now.  

The song "Grown" is about how all of the bad stuff has helped make us who we are and in its own way it can be somewhat catchy.   It's more of the get up and dance track of the two because it is followed by "When the Victim is Played", which is the acoustic, sad number that for some reason sounds like it's raining in the background of throughout.

If you've still somehow managed to not hear Animal Flag then these two songs on this EP are a somewhat fair introduction to how the music can be electric or acoustic and just give you an overall idea of what to expect when listening to more songs (which you definitely need to, though saying it makes me feel like a broken record)

This EP does serve as my introduction to Plainview though, which as a name reminds me of a shortened version of Hidden in Plainview, who were never my favorite band.   The first of the two songs has this punk vibe underneath the otherwise tone of perhaps Forgive Durden and what I want to say is ska.   It's something like The Rocket Summer or The Academy Is, but really it just has that quality where you can say it belongs with those sorts of bands without actually sounding like one of them definitively.

The vocals have a way of being stretched out as so they're almost screamed and sometimes that primal scream does come out.    In fact, that bridge that does somewhat scream in "2338" (Which is odd because the instruments get quieter while the vocals grow louder) reminds me of I Am the Avalanche.

"Seasons", the second song, has an acoustic vibe to it that reminds me a lot more of, well, Animal Flag than anything else.   Yes, I do reference comparisons to Animal Flag in other reviews but, no, I didn't think I'd be doing it in this review as well.   There are still some Avalanche undertones though.    What can only be best described as baseball organs take us into a slew of lyrics about the winter and that actually does make this sound a little bit more like a Christmas song.

A dreamy guitar solo leaves me uncertain as to who to compare this to now, but I do picture Santa Claus playing the guitar and yet I still want to hear more from Plainview so that's saying something.   The way the song kind of draws out at the end here reminds me of The Honorary Title but it doesn't really resemble them in any other ways specifically.

So I'd go through my normal thing here and say that this is four songs and two of them I knew were good ahead of time and the other two I wasn't sure of because I'd never heard of the artist before, but let's be real about this, people.   This is an Animal Flag split and you can download it for zero dollars.   You knew I would be downloading this regardless of what the other two songs sounded like.    Thankfully, they're rather good and now I'm going to go look them up when my internet is done glitching.