Song of the Year: SAMIAM, “Lake Speed”

Hey, I know I said I was taking a break from writing for a while, but before I go: “Lake Speed,” off the album Stowaway by East Bay pop-punk veterans Samiam, is my favorite song of the year. In the context of the rest of the album, it’s “just” an opener, a way to bring listeners in to hear what Samiam has been cooking for over a decade of silence and stillness, but it does something to my aging punk brain^[1]I’m turning 32 in two weeks. that makes it fire off in the direction of Dillinger Four, blessed be their names. And then, before you know it, it’s over:

Stowaway as a whole is a perfectly fine album, slightly outside of my own preference parameters, but genuinely pretty good. None of the other songs on the album have quite the same energy as “Lake Speed,” though. The bent, anxiety-generating note that brings us in, the relentless drumming and bassline by Colin Brooks and Brad Darby, respectively, the lyrics that evoke a sense of careening down an empty stretch of road at maximum velocity as though you can actually outrun your own life falling apart around you, the dueling vocal melodies mirroring the rhythm and lead guitars, the frenzied pace… everything culminating in a tornado of affect that sends shivers down my spine still, after almost nine full months of nonstop listens.

There are realistically a lot of songs like this out there, but I was being genuine when I said that this song reminds me on an almost monkey-brain level of Dillinger Four, the Minneapolis pop-punk band that has been dormant since 2008’s masterpiece, C I V I L W a R. Peep these lyrics in particular:

SEE THE WAY YOU LOOK AT ME/ WITH PITY AND CONFUSION/
TRIED TO BE YOUR EVERYTHING/
ALWAYS END UP LOSING/
THOUGHT SOMEDAY MY TIME WOULD COME/
SACRIFICED AND PRAYED/
UP AHEAD THE FLAG GOES DOWN/
WHILE I MELT AWAY

For a bit of fun comparison, here’s Dillinger Four’s song “A Jingle for the Product”:

Accidents or accusations/
I got my fucking reasons/
And even hearts of gold can overload/
When they’ve lost what they believed in/
When the seams start to come apart/
In this frustration we find our salvation

It’s good! It’s good god dammit!!!

Anyway. “Lake Speed” makes me think a lot about Dillinger Four and this kind of burly-sensitive Midwest emo/”Gainesville by way of Milwaukee”-ass punk music. It has had full control of my brain for a decade, and I’ve been craving more of it all that time. In lieu of getting more, I’ll be content to continue playing “Lake Speed” and its influences at full volume while driving down an empty road at night as fast as I possibly can.