Let’s Stay Outside – Lost American (Reviewed by Dave Franklin)

It’s hard to tell where Chapel of Roses ends and Lost American begins. But that’s okay; a certain amount of musical DNA is being shared within both musical camps, and they both fit roughly into the broad post-punk sound. But whereas Chapel of Roses celebrates the sort of sound that arose when punk guitarists started exploring outside their genre three-chord, attitude over ability approach, Lost American is a continuation of the story of those who embraced the emerging keyboard technologies and turned those to their creative will.

Let’s Stay Outside is a song so wonderfully spacious that it is made as much out of drifting atmospherics and haunting anticipations as it is from the digital beats and synthetic pulses which form its more solid sonic presence. 

Like any song worth its salt, it is as much what the song is about as what it sounds like that makes it linger long in the mind. It is not just the sound of the voices but what they have to say that adds intrigue. Here, cloaked in personal experience and a slight lyrical opaqueness, Chris Kelley taps into a sense of loss, of a loved one passing, and the sound of a banshee-like voice marking the moment. Real? Imagined? A worldly sound? A voice from beyond? Who knows?

But the best lyrics are also layered, have a duality, or more, and can send more than one message at a time, depending on what the listener is receptive to. It is pretty telling that Chris was an ex-pat living in Barcelona when he wrote Let’s Stay Outside, an exile living beyond the borders of  the world he was born into. Perhaps there are as many more meanings as the audience can find in the song; maybe it isn’t the creator who decides ultimately what a song is about but the listener…it isn’t so much about the message sent as the idea received.

Whatever you take from the song, there is no doubt that it is a fantastic piece. It is deftly done, understated, brilliantly emotive, and able to take the idea of the pop ballad, for want of a better term, far beyond its usual creative benchmarks. On top of that, when taken together with Cast Out to Sea, it shows two distinct sides to Chris’s songwriting, but two sides of the same sublime coin.