MIDI Bunny fall from their tower on thirteen-minute single.
“Falling Down Part three?” Is there a part one and two? The blog’s been on an unintended break for a bit. There’s a bunch of reviews in the backlog, the first of which comes out Monday. Unless you count this, so welcome back?!
Last year MIDI Bunny dropped their self-titled EP, a top ten on our year end list. Last month they dropped the follow up, MP3 Kitty, equally great but even more daring. Now, today, the band drops their best work yet. Cecily Renns, one half of this duo, has been kind enough to share with us “Falling Down Pt. 3” a bit early, and now the song is out in the wild, so we can share our thoughts on it here with you. This track is a whopping thirteen minutes but earns every second.
The new single opens like a huge pop punk single from the aughts, stadium ready riff, tinges of exciting percussion and a mental image similar to the glimmering ocean. It presents such a sense of hope before any words are even uttered. The intro takes a chiptune turn but does it so naturally, this twist caught me off guard the first time, but it makes so much sense. In tandem with the classic alt rock instrumentation it sounds all the more modern.
The actual lyrics to the first verse are really beautiful. I’ve been at this bus stop feeling like no one’s walking besides me. Coming down from a break-up when the relationship was a good one is such a crushing feeling. I’ve often journaled it feels like falling from Eden, falling from a tower makes just as much sense. The drums here clash with the more mellow presentation but in the best way. I feel like I should be down and emotional and yet I’m dancing in my seat. Similarly, the backing vocals are an interesting choice. They aren’t in time and don’t even sound like they’re coming from the same channel at the same time and yet they still enhance the leads. This verse, this track, seems to tell the origin story of MIDI Bunny. The first few lines talk about starting a band, playing the bass, being a bunny, all things I expect from the beginning of this project.
They try the disjointed vocal layering again, and no matter what they slap it on it sounds hard. The half yell echoes so loud it could fill the room. What follows is a guitar solo I really love. Classic and huge with sweeping notes and lingering chords, it’s what rock is supposed to feel like. All of this is backed, again, by this bitpop production and sounds like it couldn’t come from anywhere but the present.
We take a turn to a reintroduction here. These dips, these change ups could have, in theory, been a new track but are written now in such a way they couldn’t really be broken apart. The deep acoustic notes and horns are the polar opposite of the song's first section but it’s what makes it a perfect mix. The vocals sort of work the same way, they aren’t perfectly in sync. They’re so emotional they’re almost cracking and the back vocal section is even more traditional. The following verse honestly made me cry, to be candid I had to pause while working on this. It’s about going through so much with someone and it not always being easy but always arriving at doing anything to stand by them. There are so many vocal stems here it’s hard to keep up but it all sounds cohesive and beautiful.
The spoken word bit toward the end describes art as a poison, it can hurt, fuck it hurt me in this very song. It’s a similar type of catharsis as the untitled track on the self-titled but I think now MIDI Bunny is such a stronger band. It all ends with a horn solo which sounds so cool. The displaced percussion, the angel choir and the abrupt end to everything. It’s the perfect conclusion to the band’s current top cut.
“Falling Down” is available right now and will be linked below. MIDI Bunny’s debut record should be coming this year but for now the band and members individually have so much to dig into. Thanks again to Cecily for allowing us to hear this one early, we look forward to the band’s future.
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