Price of Progress by SMILE

You feel this distinct sense of hopeless guilt in America when you drive on an urban highway. Such trips are often necessary, but you know that every mile of this freeway was designed to segregate your travel lanes from neighborhoods that struggle with the worst urban poverty in the country. Such feelings (albeit in a European context) rule the day on Price of Progress by SMILE, a relatively straightforward post-punk record that substitutes the genre’s typical washed-out singing for spoken, socially conscious poetry. SMILE wants desperately to become a part of something in their surroundings, but as yuppies they know that they’ll never integrate fully into the urban neighborhoods that they adore so vainly. Instead, they glide across the city on segregated infrastructure, occasionally fumbling conversations with these people that they feel embarrassed by their inability to relate to. It may sound like I’m painting this band in a bad light, but I sympathize with them in a major way, and the honesty with which they address these issues could help us deconstruct our webs of faux authenticity that we spin ourselves into.