My butt has been famously sore regarding The Lawrence Arms for a while now (ie YEAH, MORE LIKE THE BORENCE ARMS and such), but yesterday, whilst staining the deck by headphones and moonlight, I stumbled upon a truth so shocking it BLEW MY MIND and I DIED. Namely that Oh Calcutta!, the band's 5th full length from 2006 is actually really good.
You see, due to the band's pedigree, I've given the first 4 LPs and EP collection an absurd amount of attention, which is patently weird/unhealthy considering how much I hate almost every song they've ever recorded. My partner has actually expressed concern regarding this, which seems pretty apt considering most people don't endlessly obsess over things they don't care for, but dammit, half of The Broadways make up this band. My hope had been that I was simply looking at TLA in the shadow of a behemoth (my favorite album, Broken Star), and that once I shook off this unfair comparison, I'd be able to cherish the band on their own unique, beautiful merits.
Unfortunately, clarity-of-opinion came when I beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was "Lousy Songwriting", and "falling asleep" followed with him. A Guided Tour Of Chicago and Ghost Stories are just dull, half-written sub-Broadways-isms, and Apathy And Exhaustion and The Greatest Story Ever Told are a bunch of overproduced, riffless wisps alternating between half-memorable Brendan tracks and thousands of soggy, nearly identical McCaughan ballads. The auto-tune on Chris' vocals not only makes those albums sound like soft, flappy penises, but penises so soft they are frequently mistaken for liquids. Seriously, listen to "Your Gravest Words" and "Brickwall Views" back to back and tell me they're not fucking identical.
Needless to say, the hard work didn't really pay off. There are a few really great tracks floating around in the Ambien fog, and the lyrics are a particularly impressive mesh of literary and pop-culture references (see: The Greatest Story Ever Told), but hey, it'd be even more impressive if that same amount of effort was put into writing actual melodies and interesting arrangements.
I never bothered with Oh! Calcutta! based on this backdrop essentially, which is kinda funny seeing as the opening number, "The Devil's Taking Names", is one of my favorite songs of theirs. A few tracks in and I was incredibly surprised to not find myself unconscious in the paint tray, lungs slowly filling with wood stain (or some other, smarmy exaggeration like that). I'm going to have to assume that the intermediate period between TGSET and O!C! is to blame here, during which Brendan started the fairly straightforward punk rock band, The Falcon, and Chris finally decided against his strict adherence to the Wesley Willis school of songcraft. Oh! Calcutta! features the band eliminating the obvious binary of song-styles by actually collaborating more apparently on writing and vocal duties, resulting in an incredibly solid 12 tracks of high-paced melodic punk rock with great hooks and a kind of urgency the band never employed before. Brendan's never sounded fiercer, and sheds a lot of the punk-caricature cadence of his vocals, while Chris apparently concluded that using autotune on a punk album might be a little too hilarious for words, and started singing in the off-key, folky register he would later employ on his Sundowner project.
I've read that a lot of people saw this as a throwback to the band's first two records, but this really doesn't sound anything like the half-assed Midwest pop-punk that populated either LP. Essentially, this sounds like The Falcon if they had the kind of chemistry that comes with playing together for a decade.
I definitely need to let this album sink in a bit more, but I am honestly pretty excited by them for once. That's something I sorta figured would never happen unless the band slowly replaced all three members or stopped writing music entirely.
God I love when bands I hate suddenly become good and then go on hiatus for 7 years.
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