Microwave

It's been ten years since Atlanta's Microwave released Much Love, but the album's unflinching honesty hasn't aged a day. While the exuberance and joy of their debut Stovall dealt with vocalist/guitarist Nathan Hardy's wide-eyed wonder at a world previously obscured by a strict religious upbringing and his time as a Mormon missionary—songs of innocence, if you will—Much Love detailed the aftermath once that awestruck amazement had been dampened by the harsh realities of life.
These, then, were songs of experience, the sound of growing pains, with the emphasis very much on the pain, on the trials and tribulations that come after the euphoria of freedom. That's not to say their past material was devoid of drama, because it was full of it, but the ten tracks that make up Much Love certainly traverse darker, more unstable territory by confronting the very existence and notion of life as Hardy once knew it.
"Thematically," Hardy said at the time, "this record is about questioning things you've been taught your whole life about how the world is. I grew up really religious and at one point I found for myself that I didn't identify with that anymore. And then I started to realize that other things, like the idea of love and monogamous relationships, were also in that same vein of stuff that I'd been taught when I was younger that were just what you're supposed to do."
Given the heavy emotional, philosophical and existential weight behind these songs, it's no surprise that the band found themselves writing music to suit this shift of tone and perspective. The result is that tracks like "Roaches" and "Busy" glisten with a more jagged and acerbic edge, one that's rough and unsteady but nonetheless still full of the melodic sensibilities that defined their past material. Elsewhere, "Lighterless" is a scuzzy, grunge-pop gem, "Vomit" is a restless, jittery ball of nerves and anxiety, while "Whimper" is sultry, sleazy and almost bluesy.
Recorded and produced, like Stovall, by Travis Hill, Much Love is a more abrasive, rawer set of songs than its predecessor, more The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me than Deja Entendu. Yes, Microwave are very much still recognizable as the same band, but at the same time these songs marked a conscious evolution of their sound.
"Musically," Hardy explained, "we tried to branch out more and experiment with other sorts of tones and vibes for songs. So overall it was very much an experimental endeavor recording it. But we'd also spent more time playing together and we'd developed more of a personality—we realized we all like to make weird noises with our instruments and we hadn't really incorporated that in the past."
It all makes for an intense and cohesive representation of life that encompasses both base human behavior and emotions—sex, drugs, alcohol, jealousy, promiscuity, to name a few—as well as those more existential and philosophical elements that lie just below the surface of those actions. It's an album that wrestles with the meaninglessness of existence and which tries—sometimes successfully, sometimes futilely—to find meaning in that vacuum of insignificance and emptiness. In that sense, Much Love remains very much a coming-of-age album, but most definitely not of the saccharine, indie flick variety. A decade on, these universal songs still land with the same profound and powerful impact.