Prairie Rock: Keep for Cheap releases new single Cyberspace
14th August 2024
Shoegaze is arguably the best-named music genre of the post-rock era. Its name comes from dingy music venues where long-haired punk-slash-rockers would play strange, atmospheric chords on electric guitars, staring stubbornly at their strings without looking up. They seemed to stare intently at their own shoes while the music simply echoed in the space around them. Whether media or musicians, they gave the genre its name.
Of course, music is always changing, and if someone tells you that Wild West country music has taken over shoegaze, you might picture a cowboy in a wheat field, staring solemnly at his banjo. Keep for Cheap, however, is anything but somber. They’re a colorful band, looking way up from their guitars, basses and drums, with a brightness to their atmospheric brooding that can’t exactly be called bootgaze. This country-inspired atmospheric post-folk rock sound is hard to pin down, but they call it prairie rock, and that’s fitting.
Variety in Prairie Punk: The new single is called Cyberspace
The description “atmospheric” fits this kind of music because it seems to open up and fill a larger space than the venue allows, making a tiny bar echo like a great empty canyon. Prairies do this too, with a sunny, golden kind of foreboding that invites you on freedom-inspired road trips in the same voice as claustrophobic corn mazes. Sounds weird, but their listeners are into it.
Keep for Cheap say their new single Cyberspace is “reminiscent of Wednesday and Bully or Pinegrove meets Soccer Mommy.” You probably wouldn’t agree that it sounds like Lowercase Noises’ “Prepare to Die, But Sow the Rye” finally went to therapy or someone told Sadness’ “On A Green” to calm down and get over its emo phase, but now someone has said that too. There’s a reverberating, distant power in common among all this music, but what makes Cyberspace so special is how it seems to draw closer and notice you. Shoegaze-like music doesn’t usually do that; it’s too busy looking down.
Cyberspace is a song built on country guitar sounds with a beat that sounds like it belongs in an upbeat country song, but a distant electronic wail gives it a celebratory tone as it alternates between moments of alert contemplation and somber drowsiness. The lyrics address how people are stuck online and the harmful behaviors that come with it, touching on themes of consumerism and the commercialization of the self.
It’s upbeat. You could dance to it. The irony would be fitting for the song, which is a central single on the band’s second album, Big Grass. The album’s producer, Abe Anderson, says, “It’s one of our deeper arrangements for Big Grass that can have multiple meanings and resonate on different levels.”
A love story for two people inspires a ban for five people
Leading band members Kate Malanaphy and Autumn Vagle often draw inspiration for their music from their own love stories – be it the romance, the troubles, the angst or whatever other human emotions you want to put into that phrase. Their goal is to “make music that moves, with driving instrumentals and poignant lyrics” that build the connection between the self, fellow human beings, the natural world and – since cyberspace brought the internet into play – the unnatural world.
There’s a lot to be said about Keep for Cheap and the unique, vibrant country-punk-atmospheric-post-rock-folkgaze-prairie-rock they create, but at this point, you’re best off listening to this. Their new album, Big Grass, is out in August 2024.
The editorial team
