The New Consistent – All That We’ve Got

Somewhere around the one-minute mark of All That We’ve Got, The New Consistent imagines himself splashed across a newspaper front page under the headline ‘The Boy’s Found His Way!’ TNC is light on the details, but I like to imagine him held shoulder-high, having finally justified his transfer fee with an injury-time winner from the edge of the box. There’s a kind of unironic blokey charm to TNC’s latest single – a charm that finds joy in fantasy headlines, leaving the groupchat on read, and getting high in the park. Softboy doesn’t quite capture the essence of it, so we’ll just call it SoftLad instead.

All That We’ve Got is awash with stories of edge-of-adulthood excess, but it soon becomes clear that TNC is recalling these stories from a distance. There’s a real earnestness to his lament that ‘the late teens fade faster than the winter sun,’ and the oppressively relaxed beat seems almost to be mocking him in places. A deliberately unfocused guitar line meanders through the verses, adding an ironic counterpoint to TNC’s memories of a lost summer with time to waste.

There are places where the affectation wears a little thin, especially when TNC waxes about technology. ‘I’ll turn off my screens and focus on the view,’ he intones with the smirk of someone mistaking a cliché for an original idea. To be clear, Jack White mandated a no-phones policy on his Boarding House Reach Tour back in 2018, and facebook memes about Those Damn Kids And Their Snapchats have been in circulation for years. It was a tiresome sentiment even before lockdown, and 14 months of enforced idleness has not sweetened it. However, it is telling that TNC describes turning off his ‘screens’ – plural – and in doing so at least cops to the bar’s absurdity. Still, the lyric lands with a thud, which shows that even SoftLads have their limits.

It’s a bold move to rhyme ‘tiredness’ with ‘process,’ and bolder still to do so in the first bar. Is this the self-betterment for which TNC yearns on the hook?  Maybe not, but All That We’ve Got shows us an artist earnestly trying to reconcile the past and present versions of himself, drawing on whatever fragments are within arm’s reach to help make sense of the contradictions. And if the problems turn out to be unsolvable inside two and half minutes, well, we’ll always have the Smoke Bench.

Christopher R. Moore