Class of 91’s second EP, Lost Stories, starts off with a seemingly upbeat sound before a six-song descent into the woes of human nature as a whole, and one final song to lift your spirits.
Lost Stories was created at the home studio of Class of 91 in Ottawa by singer-songwriter Ian Ferguson and drummer Steve Clifford. Steve and Ian were high school friends in the 90s who played music together and stayed in touch. Brock Sarault, who plays rhythm guitar, and Fred Pantalone Jr, the bass player, met Steve and Ian through the motions of life after high school. It became a conversation between the four as music lovers that they should get together to jam, and they finally did in the summer of 2019.
Ian said it was cathartic to pick his guitar up again since it had become ‘just another piece of furniture in his house for a while as he went through the motions of life. Ultimately, the passing of his father made him rediscover his love for music.
“Music refocuses the mind. I needed to ask myself what was important to me. What do I take for granted?” Ian said in an interview.
While grief was the tipping point for Ian to pick the guitar back up, he always saw music as a way to articulate his walk of life to those who have shared experiences. According to Ian, “Class of 91’s first album had no coherent theme”- each song expressed something contained within that song. However, their upcoming EP is structured much more like a concept album that explores three main themes: mental health, mortal conflict, and the duality of humanity.
The first song on the EP, Look How Far We’ve Come, expresses what it’s like to age through history. In 1991, the year Class of 91 graduated, the cold war was wrapping up, optimistically paving the way for an ideal world without any threat of nuclear war. Look How Far We’ve Come gives the listener this sense of optimism in the opening verse with energetic guitar riffs and a steady and continual build-up of energy before plunging us into the woes of shared human experience.
The chorus suggests a more grim reality with the line “I see the look in your eyes,” delivered with a foreboding inflection. ‘Look How Far We’ve Come is thus an ironic spin describing how Class of 91 grew up with the threat of nuclear war central to their childhood experience. Now more than 30 years after the conclusion of the Cold War, the possibility of nuclear war between nations is present again. They must explain it to their children, seeing history repeat itself without skipping a generation.
The sixth song on the EP, Polaris, lets us look through the eyes of a young person experiencing both the good and bad trajectories of the world. The main point is that the human experience is not new or unique.
“Life represents itself over and over again in new packaging; it’s simply being amplified in a new way,” Ian said about Polaris.
The fictional character in Polaris is struggling with anxiety and shame. These two emotions rear their ugly heads at virtually every stage of life. Depicting two sides of the same coin, the character in Polaris is grappling with feelings of failure as they reflect on all they’ve learned and achieved as a person. Microcosmic of humans as a species, Polaris begs the question: What have we learned as a people? The listener gets the parallel sense that we, as a whole, have failed.
The second and fifth songs on the album, These Four Walls and Hideaway, detail the struggles and comforts of living through the isolation of the covid-19 pandemic. These songs juxtapose the universal struggle of loneliness with the significant global impact of isolation: dualism is a crucial theme in these songs. We see an unnamed protagonist, visited by a bird and lamenting his loneliness.
However, there’s also a sense of adventure in isolation if you seek it out, for example, enjoying the mystery of a completely empty city. The broad range of perspectives is a characteristic that makes this album so well-rounded, and the binary opposites create a sense of familiar discomfort- these are mortal struggles, universal to all those who want to reflect on them.
While the first seven songs take us on a journey where we must grapple with emotional turmoil, binary opposites, and universal human questions, the last song, Simple Human Love Song, brings us back into the present moment. A light acoustic refrain, accompanied by a rustic lyric melody, the repeated line “this is a simple human love song” expresses that at the end of the day, all people want is to be safe, happy and loved- and furthermore, we can find this all around us.