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I was around seventeen years old when I first discovered La Dispute. I had been researching bands for a paper on the importance of creative lyrics over catchy music when I came across their song “a Letter”. I had never heard anything like it in my life. For once, lyrics were the focal point of the song. As a passionate follower of spoken word and beat poetry, La Dispute was beautiful and refreshing. I listened to the entirety of Wildlife first, and then moved on to Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair. I couldn’t get enough of the creative lyrics backed by a beautiful arrangement of music that somehow managed to emphasize all the best parts about the singer’s voice.
In their album Wildlife, the singer wrote an assortment of “letters” without knowing who he was addressing them to. It began with “a Departure”, a wonderfully constructed piece that sets the mood of the whole album. The first solid minute is just an instrumental build, leading into the vocals that sound like an echo in an empty room at first. The whole thing is a work of art, poetry in the purest sense of the word. The struggles as the singer fights his inner demons and works to understand the world he has seemingly just woken up to.
