As far as aching indie rock reveries and reckonings are concerned, allie’s “Tiny Colored Pills,” taken off her sophomore album ‘Every Dog,’ is a brutal beauty.
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Stream: “Tiny Colored Pills” – allie
As far as aching indie rock reveries and reckonings are concerned, “Tiny Colored Pills” is a brutal beauty.
Taken off allie’s recently released second studio album Every Dog (September 27th via Anxiety Blanket Records), the searing song offers three unfiltered, unapologetic minutes of exhilarating anxiety and exhaustion. It’s the most aching feelings you’ve ever felt – about yourself, about your life, about what it means to be in and of this world – channeled into a tight, charming, and churning musical eruption.
I can only stand still
While you’re hurling around my head
From a windowsill
I’ve been looking towards my deathbed
If the city’s fine,
We can leave it
Let’s spend a paycheck
Like through your mother’s eyes
Don’t know how I’d get by without you
“Over the past three years, ‘Tiny Colored Pills’ is a song that has existed in various arrangements and presentations within the allie band,” allie’s frontwoman Allie Cuva tells Atwood Magazine. “Our hard drives still contain unreleased recordings of this song as a much slower, sparser, ballad-type thing, and also as a more lush, accompanied, live-tracked ballad, as well as this third and current version, which I’d consider more of an energized-to-distillation, uptempo bedroom banger.”
“If sad ballads are blue and rock music is red, then ‘Tiny Colored Pills’ is indigo as all get-out. Its roots of origin are planted in a slower, bare form, and yet its current and final form on the new Every Dog album seethes and simmers with a brighter, more propulsive energy that has finally surfaced and made itself known to us, emphasizing the urgency of its lyrics that deal with romantic idealization, suicidal thoughts, and recalling teenage years with a propensity for self-abandonment, drenched in a yearning to belong.”
“Now, the frayed-around-the-edges, DIY-style of recording reflects the spirit of a song that could’ve only been written from an unguarded, vulnerable place.”
Skyscrapers in the back seat
Wondering if you love me
I think you do
Doc Martens on the concrete
Walk me through everything
How do you do it?
How do you do it?
Cuva cites The National’s song “Apartment Story” as inspiring the uptempo drum beat and guitar tone, while noting how the vocals and lyrics were her way of getting some bubbling-under-the-surface emotions off her chest.
“By itself, the drum beat smells of surf-rock (with a snare hit on the ‘two and,’ in addition to the expected ‘two’ and ‘four’ of the measure), but paired with the grit of eighth-note guitar strumming through a tube amp breaking up beautifully into your ears, a different character is achieved,” she adds, diving deeper into the song’s structure.
“The drums feel buoyant and unserious while the guitar acts as a weight, grounding the instrumental. Also, the 4/4 measures are grouped in threes rather than in fours, which helps to create forward momentum and roll the listener right into the next section.”
Tiny colored pills
Help you paint what you want to see
Are you dragging the brush around
When you’re looking at me?
I’ve been lost in a movie
Since I was fourteen, and i can’t get it back
Smoking before school
I’d have done anything for the feeling
Skyscrapers in the back seat
Looking like you love me
I love you too
Doc Martens on the concrete
Walk me through everything
How do you do it?
How do you do it?
“Tiny Colored Pills” doesn’t so much roll forward, as much as it runs, rollicking and ricocheting as passionately as possible as allie demand our undivided attention. The result is stunning: This song, alongside many of Every Dog’s tracks, leave us inspired, uplifted, and moved – eager to delve ever-deeper into allie’s warm, welcoming, and wondrous indie rock world.
I become your breath
When I lean up close to your chest
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© Rachel Bennett
© Rachel Bennett
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