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Each month, Consequence spotlights a rising artist with our feature series CoSign. For November 2024, we’re amped up about the Virginia duo Illiterate Light and their new album, Arches.
The first few seconds are jarring. Illiterate Light’s “Norfolk Southern” opens with Jeff Gorman singing “Round and around and around the clock” spun through a vocoder, the frontman stretching out the vowels and over-enunciating each consonant. Then comes the boom: Drummer Jake Cochran bursts through the door like a SWAT team, backing Gorman’s growling guitar with a Can-inspired breakbeat.
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If it feels like a train pummeling past you at a railroad crossing, that’s intentional. “I feel like some songs kind of write themselves,” Gorman says of “Norfolk Southern” over Zoom. “It just came out of being glued to the news cycle.” He’s referencing the song’s fraught subject matter, which touches upon the 2023 East Palestine train derailment disaster in Ohio. The Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed, leading to widespread environmental contamination, forced evacuations, and ongoing health concerns for nearby residents.
Though Gorman and Cochran don’t live in Ohio, they were nonetheless affected by the incident. “For us, [the song] was just a way to say that this is happening over and over again. We’re choosing industry over the environment and we’re all complicit in it.”
A press release notes that “Norfolk Southern” also serves as “a metaphor for Gorman’s turbulent feelings,” and it’s clear when chatting with the duo that the song came from an urgent, emotional place. The intensity found in the song’s rollicking opening, frenetic guitar solo, and Cochran’s shouts of “Break! Break! Break!” are Illiterate Light’s way of wondering how we can let this happen over and over again.
This cards-on-the-table approach is a rewarding aspect of Illiterate Light’s stellar third album, Arches, which arrived last Friday, November 1st. It’s a level up in many ways for the Virginia band, who have evolved significantly beyond the barebones approach that a guitarist-drummer duo might imply. Now, they’ve gotten much more ambitious as producers and arrangers, recruiting veteran Joe Chiccarelli behind the boards for a pair of songs and running the alt-rock gamut in the process.
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