RVG. Photo by Izzie Austin
The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.
Of all the rituals in the Western world, funerals are the ones most susceptible to artifice, assumption, and outright deceit. Perhaps you've had to sit shuffling uncomfortably during a service, feeling the weight of fluorescent lights, cheap perfume, and inadequate eulogies — things you and the deceased might have made fun of before their passing — that are now the backdrop for a summary of a cherished life. RVG, an Australian post-punk band who prefer raw and unfettered emotionality in a genre that can prioritize aloofness, make such a funeral the subject of "Tambourine," a standout track from their new album Brain Worms.
Romy Vager, the band's frontwoman, writes lyrics that can feel like transcriptions of intimate confessionals remolded into literary internal monologues; "Tambourine" illustrates this tendency at its finest. Vager's opening lines bemoan the funeral's inclusion of a maudlin turn-of-the-millennium rock song, an observation as mordant as it is tragic: "They’re playing 'Drops Of Jupiter' / Cause they never even knew ya." The surrounding instrumentation is gentle with subtle orchestration and has more in common with jangle pop than Television, another demonstration of the band's range.
Barrier after barrier is erected in front of Vager preventing her from reaching closure: the pandemic-era gathering's in-person restrictions, the "white lady funeral" devised for the departed, and Vager's own guilt: she clings to a mantra of "I wish I had of said I loved you" like it's the only thing separating her from the wretched proceedings before her. The song's most devastating moment, though, comes in the second verse: "So I'm playing a record / I know both of us like / Thinking one day in the future / You’ll be gone for a long long time." So simply and so well, these lines capture when death's wrongness begins to calcify into something permanent, regardless of anything left unfinished or unsaid.
