B-Side Guys

Counting setbacks becomes futile when the future you planned evaporates entirely. Best Noodles In Town open their waterfall EP “Better, I Think” with this brutal acknowledgment, crafting a song that excavates the specific heartbreak of watching friendships calcify after college. “Reverie” doesn’t just mourn lost connection—it anatomizes how proximity transforms into estrangement with surgical precision.

The production work by Jackson Ward at Strata Recording captures something essential about memory’s unreliability. Each instrumental layer feels slightly out of focus, like trying to recall exact details from significant moments that now exist only in fragments. The band’s genre-blending approach serves this thematic content perfectly; nostalgia demands musical eclecticism because real memories rarely arrive in single emotional flavors.

Kris Krummet’s mastering gives the track appropriate weight without sacrificing its raw edges. When the vocals deliver “I hate being numb,” the mix ensures you feel that numbness as sonic experience rather than just lyrical concept. The production choices support the band’s understanding that emo’s power comes from specificity rather than melodrama.

The backyard setting anchors these abstract feelings in concrete space. There’s something particularly devastating about outdoor memories—they can’t be avoided or redecorated, just endured whenever weather and circumstance align. The repetitive structure mirrors how obsessive thinking works, circling back to the same painful realizations without resolution.

What distinguishes “Reverie” from typical post-college lament is its refusal to romanticize the past or demonize the present. The narrator acknowledges their own role in relationship deterioration while still grieving what’s been lost. “Though I wish it could” becomes mantra and surrender simultaneously, recognizing that wanting different outcomes doesn’t make them possible.

As opening statement for their EP, “Reverie” establishes Best Noodles In Town as artists willing to sit with uncomfortable truths rather than rushing toward cathartic resolution. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say about being “better” is that you think so, sometimes, at least.