“Salt” – Passenger Lounge
Easy-going and effortlessly engaging, “Salt” is precisely the kind of song that fuels my ongoing desire to keep doing what I’ve been doing here since (yikes) 2003. Passenger Lounge is an unassuming three-piece band, comprised of family members in New Orleans who make no effort to bowl you over with online hype. The email arrived without fuss or preening or reference to their streaming or follower numbers. (Aside: I don’t care about anyone’s streaming and/or follower numbers.) The music was more than enough.
“Salt” grounds itself in a strummed, backbeated groove then immediately establishes its distinguishing sound: the lead singer, identified only as J, with a voice that’s equal parts air and substance, singing a seesawing melody with strings of words that feel both inevitable and difficult to follow. As you settle in you begin to notice a male voice (this would be either Alec or Peter) in subtle accompaniment, and a wayward saxophone blowing in nearly atonal concurrence. The song presents a continual dialectic between resolution and irresolution, with each lyrical line seeming to start on a resolved note and to end unresolved, which creates an irresistible forward flow.
Things subtly alter around 2:10, as the song’s underlying momentum remains but with the music, now, staying unresolved for a good 40 seconds or so. Lyrics pile onto each other as the melody seems to run into a wall before a sense of release arrives around 2:56 as the original pattern returns, boosted by a new sense of urgency and the male singer pushing more to the front of the mix. Just as we’re reacclimated we get a whole new melody at 3:39, in a late-arriving bridge that’s really more of a coda, leading into an all-instrumental final section featuring even later-arriving electric guitar work that eventually dissolves in a puddle of electronics. The whole thing is captivating in a low-key but insistent way.
“Salt” is the lead track from the band’s debut, two-song EP. You’ll find it on Bandcamp.
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