‘Give Me More’ opens with a question and answers it before the chorus arrives. Softklub is the Edmonton duo of Keenan Gregory and Mark Wojcicki, built from the surprise Gregory handed Wojcicki when he sang over a piano part that was never asked for. Wojcicki had built the original track to be small, and the song grows out of his friend’s refusal to add only piano, layering guitars and a second drum pattern into something the National would have recognized.
The speaker in ‘Give Me More’ wants more from a person who is not in the room, and the song answers the want by itself. Keenan’s words for the source are a ‘lifetime supply of yearning, mixed with some unrequited love and a fixated obsession of the past,’ and the song does not argue with that sentence. It does what the title asks for, in the only room that is still listening. Softklub’s debut is the answer the absent person never got to hear.
Give Me More’ leaves the listener the way the song’s speaker leaves the absent person, still asking, still mid-sentence. Softklub’s debut ends in the middle of a question, the last chord the tone a person leaves on a phone message at three in the morning, the kind that does not know if anyone is still on the other end.
