From the opening Old 97’s-like deep, fuzzy guitar line, Five Eight’s Your God is Dead to Me Now works the realm between AltCountry and Georgian indie rock. While back in 2004 I said that their self-titled album recalled a Coldplay interplay with Georgia, there’s more R.E.M. here now.
That opening on “Sad Eyes” even finds lead vocalist Mike Mantione sounding a bit more like Pere Ubu’s frontman David Thomas—a touch of angular wail in Mantione’s voice. Urgent train rock takes over on “Motorcycle,” whose chorus pulls things back while you wait for the band to kick it back into gear. A bluesy, country warble, darkness greets you on “The Ballad of Frankie Jr.” “Next to Nothing” brings out that R.E.M./Athens sound even more. “I’m a Wreck” rocks around a groove even while having a twangy swagger. Later “Mom’s Best Boy” comes on as a countrified punk rock rocket only to be matched by the clamor of “Scout Knot.” All in all, it’s quite a range out there on the Georgian hills.
I recently used the incredibly catchy title track in teaching a high schooler about the Christian faith. An unlikely source for a Bible lesson, “Your God is Dead to Me Now” actually grapples with exactly what I want ever member of our congregation to struggle with: what happens when it seems like God is dead to us, like God is distant and not present in our daily papercuts and eventful cataclysms? Much like what I hear from the psalmists who question where God is (whose music is lost to the centuries), Mantione and Five Eight present those same kinds of questions on an upbeat, rocking, sing-along, whistling song. For instance, Psalm 77 asks some very difficult, emotional questions:
Will the Lord reject me for all time?
Will he ever accept me?
Has his mercy come to an end forever?
Has his promise been canceled throughout every generation?
Has God forgotten to be merciful?
Has he locked up his compassion because of his anger? (GOD’S WORD translation)
And if a psalm in the Bible can ask those kind of questions, well, certainly we can ask those questions, too. We can come to God with all of our doubts and fears, sing them along with Five Eight, and God’ll hear our confusion.
And they’re just questions right? While Mantione says over and over again that “your God is dead to me now,” there’s still room to say that he could be wrong, he could be off-base on thinking that God is dead, it could just be his experience. Mantione sings: “You’re not real; it’s just how I feel/You’re so dead to me now.” It’s just how he feels, and it’s just how all of us feel sometimes I suspect. We’re talking to God, we’re telling Him that He seems to be dead, but we’re just talking about our experience, our feelings. We’re not confident that our experience equals reality. We’re not confident that by one bad day or one horrible tragedy that it means there is no God. So meanwhile, the song whistles along with some kind of confidence that there’s hope beyond what we can see. That, to me, equals faith in God. Confident in what we cannot see, confident in something much grander, greater, and more loving than what we can see around us. Whistle a joyous tune even while wondering where God is in all of this mess.
So Five Eight is definitely a part of my faith instruction now. The next step: see if Five Eight would write some music to go with Psalm 77.
