UNDER THE OAK TREE BY CARDINAL BLOOM

Timothée Chalamet asks if he can commandeer your vehicle in an intense high-speed chase, wyd? 

Now, I have no idea what this means, or why I even wrote it.* So no one knows what it means, but it's provocative. It gets the people going! 

Some might complain that I write about Cardinal Bloom too much. That I should write about the dozens of other artists in Utah. And to them I say, suck it up, buttercup! It's a helluva lot easier to write about music when it's consistently good, and "Under the Oak Tree" is that—good. 

And while I have no idea what my Timothée Chalamet hypothetical means, I know exactly what this song means, but luckily for us, that doesn’t prevent it from getting the people going. Lead singer Joey St. John described in a recent social media post that this song is about—and written during—a time when he was in a rut and felt that every song he was writing was sad or angsty, but this song gave him hope. It helped him break out of that rut. It helped him to keep moving forward.

The momentum this song gave Joey transfers to the crowd when the band plays it live. Like I said, it gets the people going. If this song could be boiled down into one word, that word would be bounce. More bounce than Ja Morant. A Derrick Rose before the injury kind of bounce.

In a recent concert, one guy literally bounced up and off the seats at Velour and disappeared into the crowd like he was possessed by an Irish river dancer celebrating the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

​So if you hate a good comeback story, don’t listen to this song. Or if you’re stuck in a Saw-like contraption where you’ll die an agonizing death if you move, also don’t listen to this song.

*I found that hypothetical in a draft of this review, and I have no idea where I was going with it.