Patiently Awaiting the Meteorite’s “Devil’s In My Car” (Single/Video)

“Take a deep breath,” whispers a soft vocal from behind the speakers in Patiently Awaiting the Meteorite’s “Devil’s In My Car.” These four words make up the first line in this new single and music video from the Canadian indie outfit, whose debut album Canyon Diablo has been inspiring a lot of excitement among critics in the band’s home country as well as in the United States, but they also serve as fair suggestion to listeners in anticipation of what’s to come in the next three minutes of play. “Devil’s In My Car” is a rip-roar acoustic ballad that ignites emotion on impact, much like most of the music that this meteoric group has created thus far tends to.

Compositionally speaking, this is the sharpest material on Canyon Diablo, but I wouldn’t say that dwarfs the other songs on the album at all. The music video is mesmerizing, and while it has a certain appeal to mainstream eyes that I wasn’t expecting to find, it doesn’t look or feel like an attempt at commercial appeasement at all. The visual concept is interesting, but I do like that it isn’t so outrageously surreal that we lose focus on what really matters here – the actual music.

I’m really not that crazy about the guitar tones in the video; personally, I feel like they didn’t carry over quite as well as the vocal track did (which remains the heaven-sent force of nature that it is in the single itself). It likely wouldn’t be that noticeable to the untrained ear, and therefor isn’t that big of an issue, but I would still like to hear a bit more precise mixing from this crew in the future. This is one of the richer acoustic numbers that I’ve listened to out of the Canadian underground this autumn, and it deserves to be heard in all of its rustic, unblemished glory.

Though the video is far from flawless, the real bread and butter of “Devil’s In My Car” is in the very framing of the melodies that it delivers in waves of silky poetry. Despite the simplicity of every element in the instrumentation, there’s a delicate, almost classical kind of a feel to the arrangement of the strings and vocals that makes the harmonies sound sprawling and inescapable. As I previously mentioned, this is the strongest composition on Canyon Diablo, and hopefully a peek into what their creative efforts still have in store for us yet.

GOOGLE PLAY: https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tk6wwhjh2nuapwu7td2oxbzc5sy?play=1&u=0

It’s not the most groundbreaking material that I’ve listened to all year, but “Devil’s In My Car” is nonetheless a very interesting look at one of Canada’s most unique indie bands. While Patiently Awaiting the Meteorite are still a relatively untested bunch, there’s enough for us to go on in this single and its video that would suggest their artistic climax is just around the corner. For this being a cut from their debut LP, it sounds like something that I would hear from a band that had recorded at least two or three albums already. Their maturity speaks for itself, as does their musicianship.

Nicole Killian