Common Sage - "Might As Well Eat the Chicken, We Won't Be Here in the Morning" | EP Review

(Cover art by Aaron Gordon)

Brooklyn's Common Sage has been quiet release-wise since 2018's "Where are you? I'm in Klamath Falls, are you here?" That album combined the more experimental tinges of fourth-wave emo with lengthy song structures and spindly guitar lines. Julian Rosen spearheaded the trio behind the record, taking on songwriting, guitar, and vocal duties. On their new EP, Might As Well Eat the Chicken, We Won't Be Here in the Morning, Rosen and co. condense Common Sage's sound into only 13 minutes.

The songs on Might As Well Eat the Chicken are divided in two: three full-length tracks and three instrumentals all titled "Part I" with some variance. That initially sounds like too many interludes for a six song EP - fortunately, it's works. Common Sage interweaves each song together, almost creating the illusion of a single 13-minute track. The instrumentals spiral around, bouncing off glassy walls of shimmering electronics.

"Wraparound Background" leads off the EP with a harsh take on the multi-faceted sound of "Where are you?" Rosen pushes into the vocal stratosphere, howling lines like "I just wanna be loved." Unadorned emotions are thrust into the unsparing light, said plainly but overwhelming with force. While overall cleanly fitting into a loud-quiet-loud structure, the track's midsection has Rosen harmonizing with bassist Jenna Snyder in a gorgeous contrast to the previous desperation. "Wraparound Background" soon hurries to a crashing end, coming full circle.

"Saw Daddy" is more menacing than its title might give off. A guitar line ascends on an escalator made of knives, chased away by Rosen's shrieking. The chorus (if you can even call it that) is a dead-eyed whisper of "I can't sleep next to you." Whether a former lover or a literal ghost is the one murmuring into your ear, it's a goosebump-inducing moment. "Wet Grass" closes the EP with a mostly acoustic solo from Rosen, depicting a frigid end to a relationship. It evolves into what sounds like Isaac Brock soloing over the Microphones - two early-aughts contemporaries that are rarely brought together in such an intuitive way.

A Bandcamp review from user NeverGrow says "Common Sage always knows how to stretch sound in the best possible way." Despite the disparate nature of how these songs came together ("recorded during parts of 2019-2020, at very different times and places in each participants' life"), the band indeed stretches each sound to conjoin, not perfectly but in a way that more honestly reflects the nuances of their creation process and the emotions contained within.

Listen to Might As Well Eat the Chicken, We Won't Be Here in the Morning below, or buy a tape from Acrobat Unstable.