Plain Speak capture pain of nostalgia on ‘Calamity’

Last Updated on March 16, 2023, 5:41 PM | Published: March 15, 2023

There are a lot of past tenses and long-foregone conclusions all over “Calamity,” the newest album from Plain Speak, and their first full-length effort in eight and a half years.

After nearly a decade of EPs and singles, it’s appropriate that the resulting album’s themes seem to focus mainly on the relationships, loves, and feelings lost to time, and on the unshakable longing for a past that probably wasn’t all that great in the first place.

Primarily the work of duo Ben See and Dan Pechacek, Plain Speak have been kicking around the OKC and Norman scenes for the past decade, dropping their last full-length, “Foundations,” in August of 2014. Since then, they’ve focused on a steady enough stream of single drops, occasional shows, and collaborations, all the while developing the sounds and songs that would eventually become “Calamity.”

And when I say “developing the sounds,” it’s actually more literal than you might think.

Pechacek’s day job is designing guitar effects pedals for Old Blood Noise Endevaors (previously headquartered in Norman, now OKC-based) where he and See were able to design and develop their own signature overdrive pedal, the Calamity Drive.

It’s little surprise, then, that Plain Speak’s sound falls somewhere in that wide open world of “guitar rock,” even without the arena-ready power chords or screeching solos that label might too often imply.

Musically, the songs on “Calamity” are all about texture. From the floating reverb tails that announce opening track (and lead single) “I Was a Flame,” to the chiming arpeggios of “Downhill Forward,” to the ringing, sustaining two-note lead of “Spinning Out,” every track carries its own unique character of affected guitar.

That said, none of these songs are effects pedal clinics or experimental showcases for the kind of left-field, esoteric effects that define Old Blood. Rather, each track is developing its own landscape, most often built from little more than simple overdrive textures, but with any number of reverbs or modulations layered in.

It’s a wall-of-sound album, but in a surprisingly environmental way that feels organic and believable as something that can be played by three or four musicians in a room, even if the reality was much more likely a countless number of nights spent tweaking knobs and fiddling with pedals.

And in many ways, the sound of “Calamity” is the sound of late nights spent obsessing over the details.

Each song carries an air of insomniac reflection, of reconsidering and recontextualizing these possibly long-past moments of quiet catastrophe perhaps years after the fact.

“I Was a Flame” is all a past tense remembrance of a jointly self-immolating attempt at love.

“Calling Me Out” is resigned to things already being “too far down now.”

“Career Day” plays like a list of naïve childhood dreams or young, derivative attempts at creativity, all now far in the past.

There’s no Bob Seger-style, “good ol’ days” lamenting here, though. The songs throughout “Calamity” don’t just feel like complaints of youth lost or chances missed. They don’t sound like the simple, tired nostalgia that’s so often peddled as entertainment now. 

Instead, these songs come across like a shot at capturing the inherent pains and wistfulness of nostalgia itself, and of the problematic, self-destructive desire to be always chasing the highs and romanticizing the lows of your own past.

When “Personal Best” dropped as a single last month, I called it “one of the best local tracks in a long while.” I stand by that, and it’s definitely one of the album’s highlights here, but it also changes slightly with the album’s larger context around it.

Taken as a whole, “Personal Best” is actually something of a centerpiece for “Calamity,” hitting the theme on its head with a contemplation of the way that even the constants of life continue changing “year over year,” and an impossible wish that they’d stop.

Even the song’s consideration of how the same old sunlight gets filtered to different colors and characters by the air feels like a nod back to the band’s own preoccupation with effects to breathe new life into the same old guitars we’ve all been playing for nearly 100 years.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and can be a lot more melancholy, and even destructive, than you or Hollywood or the millions of social media pages that prey on it might realize.

For See and Pechacek, after working toward a new full-length album for so long, the nostalgia inherent in Plain Speak – that early-2000s indie-rock/emo sound – is a welcome and shockingly effective foundation for addressing the passage of time and what we lose to it.

Twenty years ago, right at the outset of Death Cab for Cutie and Band of Horses and The Shins and Manchester Orchestra, “Calamity” probably would have been a massive underground hit.

Now, with those bands all kicking and screaming their way back into the mainstream with anniversary tours and comeback albums galore, “Calamity” deserves to be held up as both a perfect addition to the sound and a perfect commentary on our inability to ever really let the past go.

“Calamity” by Plain Speak is available now on all streaming platforms courtesy of Clerestory AV, with a limited edition vinyl available at plainspeak.bandcamp.com and clerestoryav.com.

Follow Plain Speak online at facebook.com/plainspeakmusic and on Instagram at @plainspeakmusic.

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