Some people take an annual trip to the boundary waters in Canada, where they're able to separate themselves from most of civilization. They spend as much time as they need there, recharging and fishing all day long. Some people just need the ability to break away from everything else that they deal with most every week out of the year for seven days of tranquility, of cooking hot dogs and baked beans for 60-percent of their meals and trying to stay hydrated on beer and black coffee. Other people, to get back to a place where they feel created, together and like themselves, they retreat to a vacation home out in the countryside, just somewhere far enough away from the clamor and din of engines, horns and voices so they can hear themselves think.
For the Chicago-based band Filligar, it's shown that it derives its greatest inspiration from moving itself right down into the belly of the beast. It likes to be communal with the very same terrorizing figures that it finds that it cannot avoid. These beasts are those girls who, only reveal themselves to be lousy lovers and poisonous people well after they've already ransacked a person and broken all their windows out. Hell if they aren't the best people to hang out with on Friday and Saturday nights though. It's the Sunday-through-Thursdays when they give the most trouble, but you're stuck with them in those intermission periods between weekends - those "rough patches" in the relationship, the weekdays.
The Filligar boys - Casey Gibson and the Mathias brothers Johnny, Pete and Teddy - write anthems about these beasts, about the midnight oil, about getting emotionally robbed, about good intentions that never turn out that way. They are big songs, with wingspans, about the easy ways that people allow themselves to be happily manipulated for those little pieces of pleasure.