LAX

Big D and the Kids Table operate at a higher temperature than most of their Boston contemporaries, and "LAX" burns with the restless, slightly desperate energy of someone who has been moving so long they've forgotten what staying feels like. The arrangement packs a lot into its runtime — horns punching through walls of distorted guitar, a rhythm section that seems constitutionally incapable of settling into anything too comfortable, vocals delivered with the ragged urgency of a message that needs to get through. Dave McWane's singing style erases the line between talking and performing, which gives the song an immediacy that more polished ska-punk sometimes loses in the process of becoming polished. The production favors grit over sheen, capturing a live-band energy without sacrificing clarity, and the horns in particular sound like they're being played by people who have been on tour for six weeks and have nothing left to prove to anyone. The lyrical territory involves transit, departure, the specific sadness of airports and the people you watch walking away from you through them. There's a streak of real melancholy running underneath the tempo, the kind that only surfaces in music that's moving fast enough to mostly outrun it. This is the sound of the mid-2000s underground ska scene at its most emotionally honest, made by a band that understood that the genre's velocity could carry weight as well as joy. It's a song for drives to the airport, for the moment just after someone leaves, for anyone who has ever stood in a terminal feeling the particular loneliness of a crowd full of departures.