Local Artist of the Year

Free Energy

by Patrick Rapa

Neal Santos

If you want, you can dance to Free Energy. You can bop around in your socks to "All I Know" and sing along to "Bang Pop" till your headphones fly off. You can hum their rabbit-punching riffs and catchy choruses — maybe you heard them in the background of some commercial? — and just feel great.

That's fine. But a vein of doubt pulses beneath the sweaty, steady rockin' beats and sprinting guitar solos. I'm not talking Inception-deep, just an undercurrent, a whiff of a whisper of fear. Let's pick up Stuck on Nothing's best track, "Dream City," from the beginning:

"Hey we're comin' out, dancin' downtown, free like whatever we dream about./ And we're moving through the night, cruising 'cross town lost in the endless sound." Yes. We're getting the gang together and hitting the town in a haze of beer and bliss. The guitars and drums gallop with the adrenaline of freedom, of youth. But then.

"And the city's all right but the streets are all the same and you know deep down you can find a better way./ Tired of feelin' bad so don't you wonder why you keep tellin' yourself it's all right?"

Wait. What the hell happened? The music's still buzzing, but suddenly we're feeling sober, vulnerable, old.

Only some quick nickelbag philosophy salvages the mood, concluding: "When you love without desire then you know who you are." From there the song bounces between despair and glory before a crescendo of na-na na-na nas.

Pretty much all of Stuck on Nothing — the debut full-length from our adopted Minnesotans — is like that: catchy as hell, with heavenly hooks and lyrics that sound like the life of the party but hint at the death of it. There's joy, sometimes in sweet, overconfident dollops, but there's no such thing as a pure feel-good anthem here. "Bad Stuff" is post-apocalyptic romance. "Hope Child" is a plea for rescue. "Dark Trance" is about mustering courage (and sweet, sweet power pop). The sound is kinda slick, for Philadelphia, anyway, so you might not notice what you're dancing to. But give it a second: This is a complicated rock record for complicated times.