For its pure irreverence, my favorite part of  “Killing Me” comes about 0:14 seconds in.  Cynically shrugging with swag, Yukumi Nagano lets slip,

F For Failure

which feels like glorious shorthand. You know: that language you use to talk to yourself, to bypass histories upon fucked up histories while still taking into account all their traces in the air as you pole vault into the present, landing feet messed up in your present of the same situation.  Yeah, a shorter way of avoiding tortured metaphors like that, which the path to your present has become.

Little Dragon–and this is something I don’t think the new crop of fans quite get–have long been a band swirling in search of a place to belong. But perpetually tempestuous and with a knack to land in hands that don’t recognize the rebel, fragile wild spirit they get to caress,  the search for that relief has been *ahem* anything but rosy.  You could, grading your fucks and your fucked up heart fucks, grade your life nicely on a curve of “F for failure”.  So, prelude to pounding out your problems, as “Killing Me” does, it feels more like a call to action than an indictment, something longtime fans  will pick up and revel in.

Little touches like that are what make Nabuma Rubberband album of the year contender material. Less immediately emotionally  accessible, the LP is actually vastly more emotionally dense than predecessors. “Killing Me” is a track about  busting out in search of life when the outside world pours in even in isolation because it’s collapsed all that’s inside; but instead of being a one note lament, it takes on all sorts of stories, “bitter whiskey slug at failed love”, “dark nighttime shower cry-hero track” and “Step up, girl, shit just got real anthem”. And it does so by combining that little one line flourish and all the emotional histories upon histories it contains as it pleads for ‘time to heal every wound’.

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