Album Feature: Drive Slowly Think Of Me By No Beauty

Tell him how you really feel.

Tell him you haven’t slept for three nights straight. Tell him you ended up in hospital, and he was part of the reason. Tell him everyone you loved has left you. Turn up at his house at 9pm and ask to see him and ignore the weird looks from his housemates and when they close the door, stick your foot in the gap.

Tell him how you really feel.

It usually doesn’t work. But that doesn’t stop me trying. It doesn’t stop anyone.

Canadian alt-rockers No Beauty spend their whole new album trying to tell someone how they really feel. The songs are filled with feverish images: lunar eclipses, needles drawing blood, teeth pulled out of mouths, glowing tv screens transmitting diseases. Gradually, as you listen to the album, pieces of a story come together. Someone in the band has gone through a breakup. Someone is hurting. And it feels like they’re using the music to say things that words alone can’t.

Opener “Hospital” unfolds in the space between sleeping and waking. Someone is sick, infected, fighting to hold onto a relationship as their body fights the fever. In this dream, nothing is clear – who caused the rift, what they fought about, whether the other person is going to leave or stay. We can only hear the longing, stretched to breaking point.

Bring me my bow of burning silver
To hunt my sickness in my sleep
My meaning is a fever burning
And you’re gonna save me

It’s frantic, desperate and lovely, like every song on the album.

No Beauty are Helena Zogogiannis (Vocals, Guitar), Jonathan Malstrom (Guitar), Devon Savas (Bass) and William Fachin (Drums). They play in a range of styles – emo-inflicted songs, softer folk-tinged numbers and down-the-middle indie rock. The first time I listened to the record, it was the quiet numbers that caught my attention. “Trust Fall into Heaven” is a shimmering acoustic number about surrounding yourself with memories of someone. It hits harder every time you listen to it. “How We Tried” is a breakup song that could’ve been written about me. “Breathe in your shadow in search of your light,” Zogogiannis sings. Sometimes all someone has to give you is their darkness. And you take it. Because you don’t know you could find something better.

Everyone I’ve ever asked for dating advice has told me to play it cool and keep my mystique. No Beauty try suggest something different. Be honest. Be sincere. Be prepared to risk your own happiness. And then, if it ends, at least you can put it in a song.

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