2015 roundup part #1

2015 was a fucking toilet. I lived in New Orleans, founded a sweet punk house with some good friends, discovered that living in a shotgun is like operant conditioning for paralyzing anxiety, rekindled a love of suicidal ideation, and learned how to create an ouroboros of sadness by drinking to feel anything which leads to feeling less the next day which leads to drinking etc. Eventually I went back to NY, regained some level of sanity, immediately dashed it on the windshield of traincore life, crossed over to the opposite side of the country, got hella sick, had two friends die within a two month span, and lost a partner of 5 years due to horrifying depression. Also, there's unlisted bonus tracks you can hear irl, but first you have to help shatter my exoskeleton of numbness so the tears can finally escape their cimmerian prison.

In summation: aw shit yeah brah 10/10 would entertain cutting my own head off again

You know what I hate? The internet.
'Kinkshaming is LITERALLY a thing I can't even I'M DONE Y'ALL Y'ALL Y'ALL [bevy of slang terms and phrases lifted shamelessly from black culture by white kids who only derive joy out of criticizing others for cultural appropriation] smh cuckcuckcuckcuckcuck problematic AF Y'ALL'

And so it is 2016. Admittedly, I haven't really kept up on current music like I used to. I pretty much spent the entire first half of the year just endlessly replaying old Guided By Voices and Jason Molina stuff (apropos of my sad, drunk aesthetic at the time), and then the second half being a hobo in my cleanest glad rags and a bindle full of dreams. To make up for this, I've combed through a ton of personal and collective 'best of '15' lists and exposed myself to everything I could, meaning dozens of albums in the past 6 weeks. THE VERDICT: FUCK YOU, I guess

1.) Beach Slang - The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us

This band has magically turned into the Wesley Willis of 'meaningful', young adult-oriented 90's rock revival. I'm not even trying to be a condescending dick here - this seriously bums me out - but how does a band run out of ideas this fast? Almost every single one of these ten tracks sounds like a barely tweaked rewrite of an older song, and this is coming from a band that only had 8 recorded numbers under their belt, prior. In fact, if you cut out "Bad Art And Weirdo Ideas", "Too Late To Die Young", "Porno Love", and "Young And Alive" (to a lesser extent), you're basically getting 6 inferior versions of "Filthy Luck" or "All Fuzzed Out" from their first couple EPs. I'm not sure what happened here, but I'm kinda guessing all the hype pushed these guys to crank out tunes faster than they could recharge their creative juices, because this is sort of a slog to get through, and it's only like 27 minutes long. Maybe I'm being too harsh, because I know a lot of people really love this, but it's just hard to get behind since I'm apparently one of those "I only like the demo" guys now. oh god how do i stop it

2.) Year Of Glad - s/t

When NONA announced they were calling it quits in late 2014, you can bet your bottom dollar that I made sure to inexplicably avoid their final show, especially since it was taking place less than an hour away from where I lived. Luckily, every member instantaneously formed new bands or joined old ones, and thus the roaring emptiness inside is temporarily quelled once more.
Year Of Glad is guitarist/sinus cavity projectionist Mimi's new project, featuring one of the 1994! guys (Chris), plus Mike from Good Luck and another Mike from some basically eponymous band. I never really dug 1994!, so fortunately this sounds more like an even tighter, better version of NONA over anything in the math-y, twinkly whatever subgenre that band occupied. That sentence was poorly structured to deliver the impact intended. An even better NONA is just what this post-9/11 world needs, though. The songwriting here is, like, rotavirus-level infectious with lots of clever arrangements, instantly memorable melodies and leads, and sweet vocal tradeoffs from Mimi, Chris, and one of the Mikes. I don't know why I've been assuming you know what NONA sounded like, but as an extension, this is more of that pop punk/90's alt rock Frankenstein stuff, but luckily, without any of the dull, Veruca Salt-ish trudging that occasionally smushed the fun out of Through The Head. Did you ever try to listen to an entire Veruca Salt album? I did, and now my life is in ruin, as evidenced above.
I'm tired and my partially-skunked-IPA buzz is in decline, so this review is probably as substandard as usual, but also I feel bad about it. Regardless, this EP is fucking great, and I seriously can't wait to hear what these guys do next.

3.) Waxahatchee - Ivy Tripp

I love the shit out of American Weekend. The lo-fi fuzz settles all over my psyche like a warm blanket in a northeast winter, and it's something I've played on a zillion sad days. My love of Katie Crutchfield's songwriting dials back to 2008, when the p.s. eliot demo hit, but 2013's Cerulean Salt was effectively the flighty "I need to find myself" college phase that kills high school relationships. For me, CS was way too cold and bitter sounding to love, the new back up band sounded sterile and rigid, and the scattershot, '90's grab bag' experimentalism made it seem more directionless than expansive.
Ivy Tripp has the same mess of styles going on, but fortunately, A) the songs no longer sound like hastily filled in sketches by a studio band and B) the songs have more energy and warmth. Well, except "Air", which sounds like a CS leftover, but surprisingly, a really good one. There are a few complete throwaways like "Stale By Noon" and "Blue", but "Under A Rock", "Poison", and "The Dirt" are excellent indie rockers, and the rest alternates between slow blocks of synth fuzz and pretty acoustic numbers. "La Loose" is just awful, though. It sounds like a trust fund at a beach party with a bunch of asymmetrical hairstyles or something. And what sucks is that underneath all the cloying "ooh ooh"s and tacky synth shit is a really pretty, sad song. If you see Waxahatchee live (which I totally reccomend), she plays it alone on an acoustic, and it magically turns from 'track I'll never listen to intentionally again' to 'heartwrenching'.
I know this sounds unenthusiastic for being "such a bigh fannn", it's just that little of it has grabbed me anywhere near as hard as any of her pre-2013 material. I can actually understand why people would like this, unlike SOME ALBUMS I KNOW, and I'm sure I'll be listening to this intermittently for a long while to come, it's just not going to be another 'tea and a journal on the front porch in the rain' album for me. I'm super happy she's finally getting the praise she deserves, but I'm just not a fan of this Pitchfork-y musical direction.

4.) Jeff Rosenstock - We Cool?

This album is great, but I seriously can't stomach this shit right now. Admittedly it's been a long while since I listened to anything Rosenstock related, but I really don't remember his lyrics ever being this bleak or hopeless before. I mean, look at some of this:

"I got so tired of discussing my future
I’ve started avoiding the people I love
Evenings of silence and mornings of nausea
Shake and sweat and I can’t throw up.
I got so tired of discussing my future
That I walk through my life like I’m the only one" 

"Were you supposed to not go to college?
Stay in your mom’s house on the computer
googling grief cures, talking to no one
Waiting for life to start feeling better?
Waiting for pain to not be a constant?
Waiting to feel like anyone’s honest?
Waiting for me to stop being sarcastic
Because I can’t accept all the bad things that happen."  

"Getting drunk all alone in a quiet hotel room.
You repeat all the most shameful things that you’ve been through.
It dawns on you, that it’s true, fucking nobody loves you.
They’re waiting for you to fall, and take your place."  

"When your friends are buying starter homes with their accomplishments
Drinking at a house show can feel childish and embarrassing
With people glaring because despite what the advertisements said:
Malt liquor doesn’t make you young."

The thing is, these lyrics don't really resolve themselves through ironic posturing or pep-talk choruses like they might have in the Bomb The Music Industry! halcyon days. They're just... deadening, and if the music wasn't the kind of bombastic carnival shit Jeff's practically trademarked (NOW SKA-FREE), this would probably be unlistenable. I guess it might be me, but all the stuff on here about feeling like a failure, struggling with personal loss, and sinking into numbness through vices isn't cathartic as it is horrifying right now.

But hey! Those hooks!

Okay fuck this I'll make a second installment later.

BREAKING NEWS on The Front Bottoms

So I guess I live in Portland now. If you haven't been, it's actually a lot less noxious and bordering on tactless self-parody than all the shit I grew up adjacent to (Williamsburg, Bushwick, Koreatown, NYC in general now etc.), but that might be like saying the equator isn't that hot if you grew up in the core of the earth. I don't know, but I like being here slightly more so than endlessly milling around the country like a low-charge magnet for federal trespassing warrants.

Speaking of which, this one time me and my friend were trying to get to the Pacific Northwest so we burned through the better part of month trying to hop a train going to Richmond, Virginia. I know! I thought 3000 miles NW was directly south, too! After abandoning the Selkirk, NY yard for essentially being the Excommunicate layer of social purgatory, we scammed a bus out of Albany to Bergen County in New Jersey. Multiple-pints-of-blood-lost-to-insect-life and execrations at the McDonald's later, we were finally burning to death on a gondola heading to Richmond in the middle of Summer.
Hence, The Front Bottoms.

(they're from Bergen)

To be upfront, this band's not for everyone. Actually, they're barely for me, even. Like, I've heard them described as sounding kind of like a combination of Andrew Jackson Jihad and Say Anything. That sounds pretty close to a mash up between abscessed gums and a disparaging letter from a collection agency to me, but it's actually a pretty enjoyable, original sound. While this is their third LP, the band has seemingly disowned the previous self-released full lengths, so the self-titled/untitled factor marks this as more of a "true" debut and not a pandering, "returnin to our rootz" sort of album (ie Korn, like, twice).
I guess for all INTENSIVE PURPOSES, The Butts That Are In The Front are a two piece with some detachable, touring/recording parts, but this album's filled out with lots of cheap, lo-fi keyboard/synth shit, a real, live trumpet, and a bunch of clever secondary vocal arrangements. That said, I figure the core members, Brian Sella and Mat Uychich, could mostly stick it out on their own, since the unembellished framework they provide is pretty strange and distinct. You get the tight, super dancey backbeat from Mat, and the repetitive acoustic riffs and bizarrely specific-yet-vague storytelling from Brian, and somehow their combined powers can make a song with this fucking chorus emotionally resonate:

And I will remember that summer
as the summer I was taking steroids
because you like a man with muscles
and I like you.

See, if I had done any research on this band before downloading their first proper album, I definitely wouldn't have ended up downloading it. Their approach on paper reads like something I've grown out of viciously since the olden days of attending Plan It X fest and 'guessing I'd give ska a try', but fortunately, for all their obliqueness and college-y lyricism, there's a lot to like here.
The Front Bottoms, to me, sound exactly like one of those hype bands that ruthlessly gentrify Tumblr with 'meaningful lyrics macros' for a few months or so. They're one of those bands like Beach Slang or The Gaslight Anthem where - regardless of your initial aversion - you eventually fold and check them out 'cause you can't stand wondering anymore - 'would joining the omniscient drum circle of pubic mound pounding over this shit also bring ME joy?'. Just like those two bands, though, these guys are almost exclusively prompted by their strong 'x factor' - so much so that their other traits kinda pale in comparison. TGA had the out-of-nowhere Springsteen/Replacements/Petty-filtered-through-a-pop-punk-lens thing going on, Beach Slang revived that Goo Goo Dolls-y 90's sound with super prosaic lyrics about rock 'n' roll and youthfulness, and The Front Bottoms are the weird pastiche of elements I described above.

On that note, I wouldn't say the songwriting here is anything mindblowing, and the cluttering of overdubs sometimes lends it a slightly amateurish vibe to my ears, but it's more about the aesthetics here than reinventing the songstructure wheel. There's just something so likable and infinitely re-playable about these songs. While the tracks "Flashlight", "Swimming Pool", "Rhode Island", and "Father" are definitely the stand outs for me, everything but the final two tracks are pretty close to great (#11 is just lacking in hooks, and #12 has a chorus that feels completely inappropriate to the dark, somber quality of the verses and bridge). This was one of those albums much like Common Rider's Last Wave Rockers where the first, unsuspecting listen drew me in immediately and was quickly canonized into Watchtower pamphlet territory, passing out recommendations wildly to whoever didn't respond with "Steve where have you been this band has been popular as fuck for like 5 years now don't you use tumblr". And yeah, I do, but not to look at a bunch of 16-21 year olds transposing 'meaningful' lyric fragments over Microsoft desktop backgrounds, so I guess I missed this phenomenon. I mean, look at this Louvre-tier renaissance of macros in the Graeco-Roman tradition.
Depending on how taut and sensitive your anus is, the lyrics may be the primary barrier to your enjoyment of this album. There are definitely times where they threaten to intrude on a good time (the chorus to "Bathtub", for instance), but then there are lines like this:

But you were broken bad yourself. You were mad as hell you felt if you had done anything with anyone else it would have worked out so well. But you are an artist and your mind don't work the way you want it to. One day you'll be washing yourself with hand soap in a public bathroom. And you'll be thinking how did I get here? Where the hell am I? If the roles were reversed you could have seen me sneaking up, sneaking up from behind.

"Flashlight" is another good example, and while the lyrics sound like they were written without concern for the listener's desire to instill order in a lawless world, that's what really strikes me as appealing: there's something so nebulous and collage-like about them, yet somehow they all seem interwoven, like a collection of brief glimpses into an intensely personal network of memories. Saying this may go down as the most publicly embarrassing thing I've ever done, but I guess the Tumbleez haranguing their 14 year old peers about complex sexual politics and embroidering The Story So Far lyrics on kitchen towels are right this time.

I don't expect to change anyone's mind on a band everyone's embraced or reviled for half a decade already, but sometimes you just need to get excited about stupid shit on your hopelessly out of date blogging operation.