Feel Good Drag (track) by Anberlin

From soundguardian 12/17/2013 10:02

From the onset, from the first major introduction of all the instrumental voices, this piece strikes the listeners hard to draw us in to the experience. There's a lot of raw, emotional musicality to the track, like the squealing guitar during the short solo toward the end, woe that matches the narrator's anguished belting to his audience - a woman exploiting his infatuation for her when her boyfriend is absent - during the chorus "this was over before it ever began!". It's a raucous hook that makes this piece so appealing.

Standard instrumentation fueled by a passionate quintet yields something like this, which seems, unusually, to allure hipsters and the general public alike.

The underlying meaning is identifiable as well. While the first verse focuses on his personal cheating and association with his audience, drowned with apprehension that the affair was doomed to fail from the onset because it was built on the foundation of lies, the narrator seems to elucidate on promiscuous actions and immorality in an overarching societal context during the second verse. Temptation is the "crutch" that rules the state of mankind, undermines our feeble wills with desire, provokes us to exchange soul for excitement, as if the "devil's got our hand". We're conscious of temptation's existence, yet we're also drawn to it; we're drawn to depravities that make us feel good, which in the long-run only serve to corrupt us, dragging us down until we whither in our own regret and self-doubt.