https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLB0JQThdaE
I'm guessing you haven't heard this one: click the link, and enjoy a bouncy indie-pop song, firm thumping beats around pockets of air over which Eric Enger's high, conversational singing voice (and Kiley Kozel's soft girlish harmonies) can enunciate. The music builds nicely into (and out of) jubilantly defiant choruses, filled in by organ notes, fiery but precise guitar, and massed singing.
Intentionally or not, the song comes across as a reply to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire".
It starts off literal enough -- "We set the fire that stopped the town/ We set the fire that burned it down.... We set the fire that cleared a name, and we escaped" -- and it pleases me already that someone called out Billy Joel for being personally insulting to arsonists. The next verse kindly explains their idealistic motivations for setting the fire. But the chorus's philosophy engages Joel on his own terms: "We're shot like cannonballs from the mountaintops into the oceans of our history. But we won't stay down." Which is essentially in accord with "We didn't light it, but we're trying to fight it".
Billy Joel uses a scanned list of names to imply the staggering magnitude of the world and its heritage; Gentleman Auction House pick one injustice involving a guy they know personally, and a direct if slightly illegal solution. Both approaches have their place; in this case I'm going with the one that doesn't appear on the same record as a song that claims personal ownership of Christie Brinkley. Overthrow the white male nonpyromaniarchy!
Alphabet Graveyard, Gentleman Auction House's sole album, is pretty great all the way through, tuneful and enthusiastic, well-arranged and smart yet puppyish. I wish I could find anything else about Eric Enger's career except a scattered series of engineering/ mixing credits and one Bozeman, MT 2015 concert by the Eric Enger Band. Even my memory of how I discovered them doesn't seem to be accurate: I distinctly recall seeing their record on three or four different ballots in Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop poll (the individual ballots being the interesting part), and thinking all their voters seemed to have excellent taste. In fact they appeared on one ballot, joined by Vampire Weekend, Cloud Cult, Ben Folds, and Los Campesinos!, as well as the one Nick Cave album I ever got into. But they were, if nothing else, well worthy of placement in that company.
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