One of the best ways to get to the chocolate-y candy center of Simon Dawes is through its insecurities. Though they're not explicitly allocated or writ small upon the right forearms of songwriters Taylor Goldsmith and Blake Mills, for anyone who shakes hands with them to easily stare at, they form the basic structure of their music. The worries consist of death and a general insecurity (garden variety) that's spotty in its strength and focus, but persistent nonetheless. It extends into a million directions, this plainclothes insecurity that gnaws and shapes.
Maybe they listen to the tipsiness more than they dismiss it, letting the gravity of anything and everything get to its rogue covering and start coaxing the truth serum into the bloodstream. These are the refined contemplations of studious young men, who work their minds and hearts like turbines, replenishing the circulation - a conservation of energies. They sound like how any of us would sound after a long night and three days without showers. It's a worn-in, worn-out kind of balance that they throw out there and onto your feet.
There's strong desperation (because life's a hard scrabble) and stronger mulling going on in all garage rock swelter that the Californian quartet deal. Goldsmith has a wish that - either way you cut it, from this angle at least - is already reality. He sings, "I want to sing with blood and guts instead I'm singing with you." The blood and the guts are already there. So are we.