Boom Boom Room (Side B)

the take

Side B is the antithesis to Palaye’s Freshman album, Side A. While through tracks such as Live Like We Want To and All My Friends celebrate life and the liberties at stake, Side B takes a much more intimate approach and appreciates the cycle of life in retrospect to the ending of everyone—death. In sounds such as the aptly named Death Dance, Palaye explores themes of religion and sex and how it affects them to such a degree that they are QUITE LITERALLY DYING because of it. Throw all of that together with a catchy tune and beat, and that’s where the name came from. Meanwhile, in slower, more sensual songs such as Dying in a Hot Tub and Hospital Beds talks about death much more directly from a lighter perspective. The first is self explanatory, with the narrator telling us that he’s dying, but it’s fine because he’s with his friends; meanwhile, in Hospital Beds, were told the story of a woman (who is presumably bed ridden) who still dances in the face of demise. Thoughout the entire album, each song focuses on death through a different lense. The final track, The Boom, seems to be the final culmination of the previous songs. We’re met with some mysterious narrator, different than the one we’ve grown accustomed to, presenting us with an idea: going to sleep and never waking up, and as you sleep, being able to dream whatever you would like. At a certain point, enough time would have passed that you would dream a dream about the life you were currently living, and then this process would repeat in an infinite multiplicity. At this point, the narrator establishes that you would be essentially God at this point. This is either an opposition to the rest of the album—that by sleeping forever in this manner, one may never die and become a god in their own right. It also may be the idea of what the narrator thinks is already going on-that we could just be consciousness formed by the sleeping mind of a being greater than ourselves, forever repeating realities in an ouroboros.