Your first problem was demanding some sort of rationale behind Modern Cynics. That’s pre-pandemic thinking. The core conceit's easy enough: tight little punk songs that (with a single exception) stick to less than a dozen unique words. Under that thumb, we find Matty Grace, twisting, bending over backwards, stripped of the lyrical toolkit that powers her folk-punk ventures. Why though? Why suffer such an arbitrary constraint? Tedium. Boredom. Lockdown. Auditory Postcards is a unique product of 2020. Here's an artist, cut off at the knees from supporting her painstakingly crafted Rumination Year (released in the spring - oops). Unable to safely pull the rest of Future Girls into a practice space. Stuck. Isolated. Four walls in Halifax - day in, day out. Twelve words or less? Why the fuck not? What else do you have to do? It needs no explanation. We were all in the same boat. You did what you had to do to keep your demons at bay. Despite these limits, Auditory Postcards can still throw you for a loop. The shortest songs, some under 20 seconds, are never throwaways. They're exercises in economy, but hardly haphazard. Out of necessity Grace experiments with repetition, along the way uncovering these wistful minimalist mantras that even the most devoted Ramones LARPers never seem to nail. Modern Cynics arose to fill a void, an outlet that's perhaps a little less self-destructive than the others. Auditory Postcards from a time and place we'd prefer to have avoided, but we're still here.
