La Dispute - No One Was Driving the Car

Pitchfork: Album Review 7.8 

Conceptual band La Dispute has released their new album No One Was Driving the Car in full with today’s final act. Released in five parts, the album concludes today with Act 5, consisting of the title track and “End Times Sermon.” The songs bring closure to an album heavily inspired by the psychological thriller First Reformed. Jordan Dreyer, the band’s vocalist, explains:

“the last act occurs in two songs, in the future somewhere, in the world left behind post-“rapture.” in the first song a car drives at night down a curving forest road with two people in the backseat: the narrator—arching his neck to glimpse in light reflected by street signs passed under whoever or whatever steers the car that carries them—and his partner, sleeping quietly against his shoulder. comfort returns to him in that moment, a feeling of resolve inside sorrow and anxiety, and we transition from there elsewhere: to an empty sanctuary, to a sermon delivered for no one (without optimism or apology) on the end result compelled to existence by humanity’s reckless determination through history to seek and install the wrong forms of faith and control toward meaning amidst chaos. a semi-hopeful note closes the album before bird song carries us out. those who suffered have been lifted from the chaos; left on earth, their planted gardens grow (the lyrics of this song borrow pretty heavily from “To Elsie” by William Carlos Williams, which i stumbled on referenced, pretty serendipitously, in a book recommended to me by Ned Russin, early in the record’s infancy).”

Self produced and heavily inspired by the 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed, No One Was Driving The Car grapples with malaise in the shadow of the looming apocalypse, which has noticeably been worsened by the advancement of tech. The title comes from a quote from a police officer vocalist Jordan Dreyer read in a news article about a lethal self-driving Tesla crash, an absurd event which raises questions about the amount of control we have in our own lives. Dryer expands “it felt apt as metaphor then (increasingly so since), not just for contemporary life generally, but for so many responses to it: how each of us thrust unwillingly and chaotically alive, to hurtle down some road toward death, look amidst uncertainty for faith someone or something outside ourselves helps steer the way.” Throughout the album, screens and cameras disrupt moments of transcendence. It happens alongside  flashes of mundane suffering—frequent daydreams of drowning, flashbacks to eye-contact with dead animals, experiences of decaying relationships and secondhand suicides—while Dreyer yells with a more primal sense and sings in a more refined way, and the guitars have a sharper edge than ever before.

The final act drops alongside a lyric video for the title track. Watch that here. Each act has been arriving with a companion documentary directed by Martin. The release of the final doc is forthcoming but check out the first four in the meantime: Chapter I / Chapter II / Chapter III / Chapter IV