B-Side Guys

Violence breeds its own language, and Caleb L’Etoile speaks it fluently on “KEROSENE.” The closing track from his album American Death unfolds like a fever dream of national collapse, where personal aphasia mirrors societal breakdown across four distinct musical movements that refuse to offer easy resolution.

L’Etoile’s Virginia bedroom becomes a recording studio for apocalypse, layering DIY production techniques that make every instrument sound slightly unhinged. The song’s suite-like structure mirrors its protagonist’s fractured mental state—sections bleed into each other with the same disorienting logic as the lyrics themselves. Drums hit like distant explosions while guitars scrape and drone, creating a sonic landscape that feels perpetually on the verge of complete dissolution.

The opening movement establishes the central metaphor of drowning from within, where spiritual overflow becomes literal suffocation. L’Etoile’s vocal delivery shifts between whispered confessions and desperate proclamations, embodying someone whose capacity for speech has been fundamentally altered by witnessing too much. His description of “swallowing waves for days / And puking up colored things” transforms internal trauma into visceral imagery that connects personal breakdown to broader cultural sickness.

The song’s most powerful section arrives with the image of “people on the hilltop / Were all pouring down kerosene,” where those in power actively fuel the destruction below. This isn’t subtle political commentary—it’s a direct indictment wrapped in the kind of surreal imagery that makes Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock such a clear influence. The plane crash that follows, with “RIP writ along its wings,” transforms national tragedy into personal mythology.

L’Etoile’s progression from “42 ways” to “47 ways” to “Lazerene ways” suggests both mathematical precision and complete numerical breakdown—a mind trying to quantify the unquantifiable. The final movement’s declaration that “we’re gods of our own making” doesn’t offer hope so much as desperate self-reliance in the face of systemic collapse.

“KEROSENE” succeeds as both artistic statement and cultural document, capturing the specific disorientation of watching a country consume itself while feeling powerless to intervene. L’Etoile has created something genuinely unsettling—a song that sounds like America arguing with itself in the mirror.