Album review: La Dispute – No One Was Driving The Car

Jordan Dreyer isn’t interested in obvious problems. La Dispute’s ferociously thoughtful frontman might have found the initial spark for the Michigan mainstays’ fifth album in a newspaper story about a fatal accident involving a self-driving car, but confronting humanity’s spiralling over reliance on technology was never going to be enough. Fleshing the concept out into a five-act, 14-track odyssey set in their hometown of Grand Rapids, No One Was Driving The Car is an intriguing snapshot of disquiet, from the intimate to the universal.

‘I longed for end times coming,’ Jordan characteristically sing-speaks on devastating opener I Shaved My Head. ‘I understood what it meant / To need to kill and reset / This stranger standing reflected / With my old image blending / Inside the mirror before me.’ Stream-of-consciousness fluidity enlivens such moments of merciless self-interrogation, but so too does it feed the urgency of a fleeting Man With Hands And Ankles Bound and it cuts through the ebb and flow to pressurise panic on an eight-minute Environmental Catastrophe Film.

Having admitted to ‘overthinking’ 2019’s Panorama, anniversary tours for 2011 classic Wildlife and 2014’s Rooms Of The House reconnected Jordan and his bandmates to the openness and instinctive thinking that earned their reputation in the first place. It’s clear to see in the kitchen sink emo of Sibling Fistfight At Mom’s Fiftieth/The Un-sound and the shimmering, politicised tragedy of Landlord Calls The Sheriff In.

By no means is it a backward step, though. Blank canvas thinking opens the floodgates for the jittery breathlessness of Steve, shapeshifting epic Top-Sellers Banquet and Saturation Diver’s semi-acoustic lament.

Instead of other music, Paul Schrader’s eerily understated 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed is listed as a main influence. A complex portrait of a minister grappling with a tormented past and a hopeless future, that exceptional film was lost on the mainstream.

Likewise, benchmarking La Dispute’s brilliance is a tricky, inherently thankless task. As much about poetry and poise as the conventional machinations of post-hardcore, a song like I Dreamt Of A Room With All My Friends I Could Not Get In might not hit as hard on face, but given the opportunity it will work its way beneath the skin and tear the listener apart from the inside out.

The soft strummed title-track is saturated with heartbreak and rage. By the time the downbeat End Times Sermon dissolves into its ponderous parting sample, it’s hard not to feel drained and dejected, but also utterly connected to the chaos of the world falling apart around us. A truly stirring reminder that we are the captains of our own fate.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Touché Amoré, Thursday, Drug Church

No One Was Driving The Car is released on September 5 via Epitaph