Local Review: Prince Duck – A Comfort To You

Prince Duck
A Comfort To You

Self-Released
Street: 04.20
Prince Duck = Moby + Iron & Wine

A Comfort To You is Orem five piece Prince Duck’s first full studio album. It’s a collection of intense and sometimes silly stories set to a humble indie background. Taking influence from folk, electronic music and metalcore, the instrumental tendencies are just as hard to classify as every other recent indie album. Though, with a really well done lyric concept, A Comfort To You might not be completely fun and games—it’s an album listeners can deep dive into and spend a lot of time digesting and interpreting. 

While I was taken off guard by the album’s satire during my first listen, I came to understand the sarcastic, playful and dark rhetoric that lurks underneath every track. A Comfort to You can be best described as music that should be in an Adult Swim cartoon. The album perfectly matches that channel’s core idea of taking dark topics and bringing in a comedic undertone that creates an entire fictitious world. 

Specifically, this idea rings true for the third track, “You’re Coming to My Mom’s House,” in which the lyrics characterize a very cringe person expressing his very cringe love. Through weird, scale-like melodies and aggressively uncoordinated lines of vocals  and intense guitar, the instrumentation matches this “ick,” and that’s the point. It’s ludicrous. 

A Comfort to You is best listened to with the lyrics in front of you—they’re a huge star of Prince Duck’s show. The events that transpire during the second-to-last track, “Smoke God pt. 1,” are so chillingly descriptive that an audible “holy shit” came out of my mouth to the empty room around me. 

Prince Duck litter other lyric mentionables, such as “I can’t eat you today / you’ve got to go away,” throughout every song. This example is sung by lead vocalist Micah Clemence and his backup vocalist Hattie Woods in obscured voices made to sound like an intimidating dragon. It’s as if we were children and they were the parents at bedtime. 

The lyrics are so dense and thought out that the singability is compromised. Both on the part of the listener and the vocalists, the inflection of the words being sung doesn’t quite correlate with how a person would speak it. Though after some time swallowing the lyrics, these passages become something magical and more normalized to the listening ear. It also helps that there’s dancier and more upbeat songs in which you aren’t focused on the words and get the urge to move around. Notably, “Hoarse!” is a great pop track that adds a lot more electronics to the mix than other tracks.

Prince Duck has produced something special and well thought out with A Comfort to You; it’s worth the listen and relisten. Follow their socials @princeduckband for information on where to catch them live, listen to the album and find lyric sheets. –Mary Culbertson

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