Every month, Consequence Spotlight a rising artist with our article series Cosign. For November 2024, we're excited about the Virginia Illiterate Light duo and his new album, Arches.
The first seconds are jarring. “Norfolk Southern” by Illiterate Light begins with Jeff Gorman singing “Round and around and around the clock” spun through a vocoder, the leader stretching out the vowels and over-enunciating each consonant. Then comes the boom: Drummer Jake Cochran bursts through the door like a SWAT team, backing Gorman's growling guitar with a Can-inspired beat.
Get Illiterate Light Tickets Here
If it feels like a train is speeding past you at a railroad crossing, it's intentional. “I feel like some songs write themselves,” Gorman says of “Norfolk Southern” over Zoom. “It just came from being glued to the news cycle.” It references the song's tense theme, which addresses the East Palestine train derailment disaster in Ohio in 2023. The Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed, causing widespread environmental contamination, forced evacuations and continued health problems for nearby residents.
Although Gorman and Cochran do not live in Ohio, they were affected by the incident. “For us, [the song] It was just a way of saying that this is happening over and over again. We choose the industry over the environment and we are all complicit in it.”
A press release notes that “Norfolk Southern” also serves as “a metaphor for Gorman's turbulent feelings,” and in talking with the duo it's clear that the song comes from an emotional and urgent place. The intensity found in the song's upbeat opening, frenetic guitar solo, and Cochran's cries of “Break! Break! Break!” are Illiterate Light's way of asking how we can allow this to happen over and over again.
This cards-on-the-table approach is a rewarding aspect of Illiterate Light's stellar third album, Archeswhich arrived last Friday, November 1. It's a level up in many ways for the Virginia band, which has evolved significantly beyond the bare-bones approach that a guitarist-drummer duo might entail. Now, they've become much more ambitious as producers and arrangers, recruiting veteran Joe Chiccarelli behind the boards for a couple of songs and running the gamut of alternative rock in the process.
thanks to our partners at consequence.net
