B-Side Guys

Portland’s capitalism problem gets the full shoegaze treatment. Joel Lane’s Goodnight House project tackles the beast of consumer culture with forty minutes of distorted guitars, layered vocals, and the kind of melodic hooks that stick around longer than you’d expect from music this heavy. Good Consumers drops next week, and it’s arriving at exactly the right cultural moment—when everyone’s feeling the squeeze but nobody quite knows how to articulate it.

Lane opens with “Department Store,” which immediately signals serious intentions by burying T.S. Eliot’s poetry under waves of distorted reverb until it’s almost unrecognizable. That’s a bold move—using modernist literature as foundation then drowning it in noise until only fragments remain. The poem gives way to wordless choruses that hit like controlled explosions, each chord carefully detonated for maximum impact.

The album’s conceptual framework works because Lane understands how to zoom the lens. Sometimes he pulls back for macro-level observations—”Good consumers, they won’t stop consuming/Until it’s in the air we breathe”—that capture the suffocating omnipresence of consumer culture. Other moments zoom in uncomfortably close: “You need rest/your racing mind/is compromised/just focus on your breathing.” That shift from societal critique to personal anxiety makes the connection explicit—this system doesn’t just change how we shop, it rewires our nervous systems.

“Existence” demonstrates this dual focus perfectly. The deadpan opener “Most people only seem to get me when I’m manic/But lately existence has got me up in a panic” connects mental health struggles directly to broader cultural pressures. It’s darkly funny while being completely serious—exactly the tone this subject matter demands.

The shoegaze elements work particularly well here because the genre has always excelled at making overwhelm feel beautiful. When Lane layers multiple vocal tracks that cascade and contradict each other, it mirrors how consumer messaging bombards us from multiple angles simultaneously. The Wall of Sound becomes literal representation of information overload.

“Affirmations” apparently goes full shoegaze banger mode, which makes sense given the irony potential—self-help culture as just another product to consume. The inclusion of Animal Collective’s “My Girls” as a cover track is intriguing choice. That song’s themes of wanting to provide for family while questioning material accumulation fit perfectly within Good Consumers’ framework.

Lead single “You Know I Know You Know” suggests Lane’s knack for memorable melodies hasn’t been sacrificed to conceptual ambitions. The title alone captures that uncomfortable awareness we all share about our complicity in systems we claim to critique. We know the problems, we know others know the problems, but we keep participating anyway.

“Please Don’t Stay Out Any Longer” offers driving energy that keeps the album from becoming preachy meditation on late-stage capitalism. Lane recognizes that effective political music needs to be engaging first, political second. The 90s alt-rock influences—Hum, Smashing Pumpkins—provide perfect template for making heavy subjects feel anthemic rather than depressing.

The album’s climax, “Oxygen,” takes devastating personal turn by addressing the death of Lane’s family dog. Using pet loss as metaphor for escape from consumer culture’s perils could easily feel manipulative or precious, but the placement as album closer suggests genuine emotional weight. Sometimes the most radical act is simply stopping—breathing, resting, letting go.

Lane’s live band—bassist Matt Mitchell, drummer Phil Culbertson, and vocalist/percussionist Megan Lane—brings “wash of shoegazey guitars, intricate arrangements, soaring vocals, and frenetic energy” to performances. That energy becomes crucial for material this dense with ideas. The music needs to grab listeners by the throat before the concepts can take root.

The 90s and early 2000s influences make perfect sense. That era produced the last generation of mainstream rock that regularly tackled political themes without apology. Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” understood how personal alienation connects to larger systems of control. Broken Social Scene demonstrated how collective musical arrangements could mirror collective political action.

What separates Good Consumers from typical “capitalism bad” indie rock is Lane’s understanding of complicity. He’s not positioning himself as outside observer but as someone trapped within the same systems he’s critiquing. That self-awareness prevents the album from becoming sanctimonious while maintaining its critical edge.

The forty-minute runtime feels carefully calibrated. Long enough to develop serious thematic territory, compact enough to avoid lecture-hall tedium. Ten tracks provide sufficient space for exploring different aspects of consumer culture without overstaying welcome.

Lane’s diverse aesthetic palette—from Sufjan Stevens orchestration to Mark Kozelek intimacy to Pavement garage rock—serves the album’s thematic complexity. Consumer culture doesn’t present itself in single style, so critiquing it requires multiple musical approaches. The genre-hopping mirrors channel-surfing, brand-switching, lifestyle-sampling that defines contemporary consumption patterns.

Critical reception has noted Lane’s ability to find humor in heavy material. BuffaBlog’s observation about “dark and sardonic take on the world mixed with chunky and energizing music” captures the album’s essential balance. Despair alone won’t motivate change; you need energy, hope, even joy to sustain resistance.

Good Consumers works because it treats consumer culture as psychological as well as economic phenomenon. The music doesn’t just critique capitalism’s effects on society—it demonstrates how those effects feel in your nervous system, your relationships, your daily breathing. That embodied approach makes abstract political concepts viscerally immediate.

Lane has created album that feels both timely and timeless—addressing current crises through musical approaches that have proven their lasting power. Good Consumers should resonate with anyone who’s ever felt simultaneously trapped by and dependent on systems they intellectually reject.