It’s curious how a new environment can shake up almost anything — like convert folksy “Dolly Parton-esque anguish” into vivacious pop-punk. When Cape Crush entered Salem’s God City Studio, their new track “San Souci” embraced an entirely revamped sound, jumping between genres without losing its initial “essence of woe,” as lead singer Ali Lipman describes it.
Which is fitting, because “San Souci” is about the place that shook her up.
Compounding grief with upheaval and loneliness, the North Shore band’s newest tune casts a wary glance back in time, to when Lipman was a new resident of South Carolina. Cape Crush dropped the new single today (March 10), revealing the title track of their forthcoming album, due out April 14 via Ancient Injury Records.
“The inspiration for ‘San Souci’ comes from years of home sickness I subjected myself to when I moved from Massachusetts to South Carolina in my early 20s,” says Lipman. “I moved back somewhat abruptly when my mother died in 2012. The lyrics contain flashes of what I was imagining driving to the Charlotte airport that final time: Blue hills on the horizon, drunken slumbers on the shore of industrial cooling ponds, tramping barefoot through rows of pines (planted by hand). The song contains anger from a relationship gone south, but also the love I had developed somewhat begrudgingly for a place called San Souci.”
That disgruntled tone snakes through the song, sometimes disappearing long enough for Lipman’s lyrics to sound genuinely endearing. She provides rich details on the second verse, recalling “Catacombs and dandelion wine / The splintered wood of the abandoned pine.” It all sounds fond, until she sticks the landing, ending the song with the acerbic line “I would like to take you outside / And stick a knife right through your fucking thigh.” A violin weeps in the background, preserving a slice of its original identity as a folk tune.
“I think it harkens back to the song’s early days,” Lipman notes. “[Now] it’s high-energy, fast, and something you can bop around to, but the essence of woe in the lyrics still shines through.”
Tune into Cape Crush’s off-the-wall woe below.
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