With their new album, Lights Out, UK noise rockers a-tota-so have clearly demonstrated their adaptability and capacity to adjust, not only within the genre's confines, but also on a collaborative level. The eight-song set was created in conjunction with several vocalists, and ultimately, the album turned out to be an exciting venture.
The quite tense Spicy Nights features Jack Gordon of Irk and Platitude Queen who describes: "At its simplest, the song is about someone’s retrospective evaluation of a failed relationship, riddled with selective memory and underpinned by an unrealistic sense of unfairness. The narrator navigates a maze of memories covering all stages of the doomed romance. They desperately haggle with the imagined perfection of what once was, marked musically by the bouncy melodious gait of the song’s opening. At the same time, they invite disdain and disgust at exaggerated injustice at the hands of their parter; a once flawless beacon of hope, somehow willingly corrupted by unknown malfeasance. At this point, the tone of the music becomes more distorted, more aggressive.
"By the end of the song, the narrator’s insecurities leave them exhausted. Only then, in the final lilting cadences, is there acceptance, and a way forward."