Have you ever had a really shitty day at work (or maybe the shittiness started before you even got there—a late wake-up, trouble at home, a traffic ticket, spilled coffee, that feeling of being behind, before your day has really even started)? Or maybe the coffee only spilled into your adrenal system and did its work a little too well, so you feel antsy, vaguely agitated, unfocused, wondering when the winter of your discontent will end? Furious is good music for that.
If you’re like me, you may apply songs like first aid sometimes, trying to stop emotional bleeding or keep a mood from getting infected. I once listened to Kind of Blue on repeat in hopes that Miles might treat a mild depression. At first, it made things worse, but then, on the sixth time through, I finally got what Cannonball Adderley was telling me: lighten up, man
Repeated plays of Furious may or may not work in the same way. The basic motif is simple, a doubled synth figure seesawing back and forth over drums that one might very well describe as “furious.” As in much of the music Ty Showers creates, the drums really drive the vehicle of the song. The road that vehicle is on goes back to the Mahavishnu Orchestra and other early fusion bands that prog-rock fans used to listen to in the 1970s. Genre didn’t matter so much back then. If I put on Return to Forever for a Yes or ELO or Kansas fan, they always dug it.
Wringing a guitar wail out of his keyboard, Ty (who got his start as a guitar and bass player) goes a little Carlos Santana on us here. It works, with layers of percussion beefing up the drums. The fadeout features a little organ one-two that may remind you of the last time you honked your horn at some idiot driver doing his best to ruin your day. If this were a movie, we’d pull up and out in an aerial shot, to reveal a line of cars backed up to the horizon.
Keep this tune playing, and your day will be impervious to rush hour and other forms of ruin. Furious is the second track on the December 2010 release, Just One Last…, and it’s rockin’ good badness.
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Jim Howard
