This is the last in a series of posts on my musical year in 2018. Today, I talk about something by Dawes.
I admit I fell off the Dawes bandwagon a little bit after 2016’s We’re All Gonna Die. It had too much bite, masking a little bit of Taylor Goldsmith’s excellent song-writing. In its restraint, Passwords was a bit more of the old Dawes. It gave us ‘My Greatest Invention,’ another number dealing with foregone lovers. I’m not sure how he does it but in songs such as this, Goldsmith packs an entire life into a song under six minutes. I see a world unfurl, a person’s dejection and denial, all summed up in the line ‘you were my greatest invention.’ All writers dream of that magical phrase, the one that packs everything into something small. I know it’s cheesy, but in Dawes, there is ‘awe.’
Joel Mak 