‘Firefighters’ by Being Dead is a fizzy pop masterpiece, four crunchy minutes of exuberance with counterbalancing moments of brittle, quiet harmonics, soft sighs, surf punk attitude and loopy melancholia. It’s a delight and you have to hear it.
You have to hear it now.
You have to listen to it loud. On your bed. Jumping up and down. Dressed as a fireman.
I love it. Being Dead are Austin, Texas pair Falcon Bitch & Shmoofy, two winsome, whimsical, rather unreliable narrators, who are variously on record describing themselves as horsegirls, bodybuilders and undercover FBI agents. And this, the first single from their second LP, is a breezy, tuneful, windmilling action tragi-drama told from the perspective of a canine firefighter, extinguishing flames before they consume him.
It’s a stupidly energetic blended-cocktail of the off-kilter drone-pop punk-lite formula of old heroes like Brix-era Fall or 90s weirdos Tiger. Great stuff. Amps on overdrive, super-fuzz. I’m reminded of lost-soldiers Yuck; what a great band they were. And I hear lashings of The Pixies’ haunting desert-oddness. Gosh it’s great.
The first half of the song is all action. “Hit the ground!”, they cry! “Reinforce! Stick it to the heat!”. Being Dead’s guitars are fire extinguishers, launching battle-cries and imperatives. “Pulling, aiming, squeezing. Move!”. You’d trust these guys in a disaster scenario.
But there’s a sting. The flames lick higher. “The fire grows / and there’s no retreat”.
The song plunges into dreamy oddness as the noise is stripped away; “through the burning, tender night”, our narrator hallucinates, “racing to the fire bright”. By the time danger has struck and the furnace intensified into “a tomb”, the song has no way through the clambering flames, no escape. “If I could turn back time / I’d live by the oceanside / and die by pacific waves”. It’s a sweet fatalistic fantasy, all the song has left. Death this way or death that way. “But I’m melting away!”.
It’s brilliantly exciting, visceral stuff! Flames turn fighters into angels! Tune in!
“It’s hard to die but what a treat
When you fly with angel wings”.
Written by Jonathan Shipley
