Single of the Week: Cavanaugh – ‘Screen Play’

cavanaugh screen play
Image source: npr.org

If you’d ever wondered what the monotonous task of trudging your way through the daily grind of nine to five, overtime, lates, nights, would sound like as distilled into a three minute rap song, then ‘Screen Play’ by Cavanaugh is the answer. Yes, this week’s Single of the Week sounds an awful lot like drowning in your own routine. Happy Monday, worker bees, you get to do it all over again, and this song will remind you of that fact. In the best possible way though.

Staple components of an alternative rap diet, Open Mike Eagle and Serengeti have both built themselves up on their dark observational humour with a wry eye for everyday life and the world around them. If this first taste of their collaboration together as Cavanaugh is anything to go by, those qualities have only been emphasised through teamwork. Especially their tendencies towards the melancholic and absurdities of the mundane.

Sonically, the track really does sound like drowning in routine as the production is murky as hell, kind of like kicking up dirt in a lake at night time as you struggle towards the moonlight and the surface. Though, there’s not all that much struggle, because the track has a kind of quiet serenity to it, like the fight has gone from trying to survive and acceptance has washed over.

Through the waters though, crisp and clear, Eagle and Serengeti carve out the narrative of nocturnal neuroses and frustrations with everything that happened to lead them here, and everything that’s still happening now they are here. Which is telling of what the album, Time and Projects, will be like as a whole, given that it’s going to be a concept album following the lives of like-named maintenance workers Mike and Dave, who work at a dystopic and class divided housing development. Dystopic is probably a stretch, because it rings pretty true of the real and right now.

Anyhoo, ‘Screen Play’ sounds amazing in its depth and haze, especially the escalating nausea of its extended outro, and both Eagle and Serengeti are on deadpan steam-of-conscious form with their two guys at the bar drowning their sorrows and rallying their woes back and forth verses.

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