There is no time to stay and decide about the monster
it’s time to burn this village to the ground
Daniel Ouellette’s A Song for an Evacuation (There’s Another Monster in Town!) unfolds like a dispatch from a civilization perpetually rehearsing its own demise. It is exuberant, eccentric, and calculated in its chaos; a jubilant panic attack set to music. Ouellette, long known for his theatrical verve and his fondness for linguistic gymnastics, turns catastrophe into choreography, panic into pop.
The track opens with an almost ceremonial pulse, a rhythm both danceable and disquieting. Jenny Rae Mettee (Fun Never Starts) supplies a brilliant bed of synths that bubble, bounce, and periodically short-circuit, while Peter Linnane’s mastering preserves the track’s sharp edges and sense of spatial drama. The arrangement is tight yet elastic, each element pushing forward with purpose, never collapsing under its own exuberance.
Lyrically, the piece feels like a parable for an age addicted to urgency. Ouellette’s booming, operatic baritone narrates a collective sprint toward survival as strange sounds, jolts, and zaps signal disaster. His delivery oscillates between alarm and amusement. The citizens in his tale, tripping on their high heels, are both participants and spectators in their undoing. The refrain of regret – those who failed to turn around – reads like commentary on contemporary paralysis. Fear, he implies, has become our most reliable civic organizer.
Beneath the humour lies a clear-eyed critique. Ouellette constructs a carnival where the rides spin faster each year, powered by our own appetite for alarm. The “monster” is less a creature than a condition: a collective frenzy fed by endless news cycles, algorithmic agitation, and performative panic. It’s a study in feedback loops: how dread becomes data, how hysteria finds rhythm.
The video complements this absurdist anthropology. A fevered montage of silent film fragments, newsreel debris, and horror cinema archetypes collides across the screen. Faces of Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff flicker between collapsing architecture and staged explosions, as if early Hollywood were trying to warn us about the present. The result is a cultural palimpsest; centuries of spectacle compressed into a few manic minutes. Destruction, it suggests, has always been a form of entertainment, and perhaps the only constant audience is the one cheering through the smoke.
Watch the video for “A Song for an Evacuation (There’s another monster in town!)”
A Song for an Evacuation (There’s Another Monster In Town!) stands as a peculiar kind of pop journalism, broadcasting from the border between satire and prophecy. Ouellette offers neither comfort nor resolution. Instead, he gives us a mirror that moves to the beat: a dance of destruction, scored for the age of anxiety.
Listen to the single below and purchase it here.
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