Feeble Strength release Call Of The Mild, the second single from the
EP “Various Martyrs” January 30th 2025.

Quick overview:
Hook-laden, 90s style indie rock about the right to make mistakes, the price of idealism

For Fans of: Superchunk, The Weakerthans, The Undertones

Autobiographical one sheet written by David, a downwardly mobile, geriatric millenial who wrote the song:

I was a romantic youth and I poured my twenties into a lot of transient things.

All the truest feelings of life’s magic I found in reciprocity and shared endeavour that comes from chucking your oars in with others. The chance to make music and the chance to build a life with someone - these things are what lit up my life, and I put everything else aside chasing them.

Neither enterprise survived the decade. Coughed out into geriatric millenialhood feeling like a chewed lump of gristle, I couldn’t help but feel I’d fucked everything up, I'd been niave. I'd let myself get taken advantage of. What I’d chosen to make important in life had been and gone like a boat I’d never boarded.

I was reading about Robert Owen when I wrote Call of the Mild. His New Harmony project: Utopians who ran away into the hills of life and their vain attempts to live outside the norm. People who found ways to bury their idealism and their values in the world, the way a squirrel hides its acorn. I would imagine how it felt to be as devout and unflinching and full of courage in conviction that you would risk everything for a new world.

Call Of The Mild is for those of us so in love with that magic of common purpose that we thrust it into situations where it doesn’t exist. I don’t know what to do about that but to prepare for a beating. There have been many times in life where I’ve dumbly and credulously filled my head with lemming dreams of sharing, sacrifice, reciprocation and instead found an arsekicking, head in hands, wondering when I’d finally wise up.

It's a hard habit to grow out of. You worry it might be dyed into our natural instinct irremovably. Always a dream of a perfect place we can find and know our efforts and our values had meant something, to put to rest the not knowing.

The way an insect smashes itself into cinders against a lightbulb thinking it will find the moon. A leg lost here, a forewing there, an antenna… crashing again and again. Certain that one final perfect heave-ho will send its body through the scorching pain of the white hot filament and out: into the bright night sky somewhere beyond.

Lyrics:

we'll build the new jerusalem
we'll build it on the bones of our old friends
between the pardon and the sin
we rent homes

we’ll build tall tall walls
we'll build them high as any many could ever hope to crawl up
like in the ark, before the fall
pure fortresses of hope

we'd meet in secret to begin, oh
to be someone inside some other life with better timing
with all the offerings we bring
we never feel consoled

or alive in our divinity
the virgin and eternity
we're alive
we're alive

we gave up our whole lives for it
we gave up our whole lives for it

now we’re alive in our divinity
the virgin and eternity
we're alive
we're alive
and alone is what we are