Day 70: The Movielife – Forty Hour Train Back to Penn

“This article is about The Movielife’s second studio album. For the pop-punk band whose name is inspired by this album, see This Time Next Year (band).” – Wikipedia

I stumbled across that earlier, and it perfectly summed up why I have a hard time not hating music like this. The Movielife made no effort here to expand on the pop-punk/melodic hardcore theme that so many bands wore out so badly, and which even Blink 182 got tired of. I don’t know who this is for except maybe kids, and I can see looking back on this nostalgically because you liked it before you knew any better — god knows that is the story with half of my old favorites, anyway — but even if you want to hear simple, emotive pop-punk, you could do so, so much better than this.

The quick turn-around between The Movielife and the band who named themselves after one of their albums gets at the problem: Kids hear this music that defines their youths, and want to make more like it. Fine, they’re having fun and probably giving other kids fun, right? The problem is when those kids start to amass in great enough crowds and buying enough Sharpie-scrawled cd-rs at $5 a pop for a trend to build, and then those 16 year olds that are so enthralled by the music pick up a guitar, turn 18, and put out the exact same album that made them want to start. It goes on, in 2 year generations, each time the inspiration diluting further and further, until it’s so watered down there’s only a suggestion of something there.

This is not a problem specific to this type of music (pop punk, or any of the pop- subgenres of heavier music that are vaguely related) but it’s a problem that I notice more in this type than any other.

I know on some days I can be very forgiving of this kind of stuff. In my post on The Helio Sequence I commented on how some kids I saw at their show were loving it, and how I loved to imagine that they had spent countless nights in their cars driving nowhere and listening to their music. And someone recommended this album to me — though I don’t remember who — so this obviously made a lasting impression on someone. If that’s the case, good. I’m glad you have whatever happy memory has built up around this album like scaffolding, and I wouldn’t want to suggest that it’s somehow invalid. But for god’s sake, please forgive me for thinking that this album is generic, uninspired, uninspiring, derivative, and does little more than beg admittance to a scene that has long since stopped existing, leaving them haunting the edges of memory, relegating them to bands you, oh, remember them? Remember that time after we went to Wendy’s and Tom was skateboarding in their parking lot and I decided I loved him? Jesus christ this album. I won’t begrudge them their fun, their shows, but they really didn’t need to hit “Record.”

Day 44: Clues – Clues

In the early 2000s the word ‘Montreal’ had a certain ring to it. It was a predictable response to the question of where the current trendiest band was from. Off the top of my head, I can recall that (obvious one) The Arcade Fire, Sunset Rubdown (substitute whichever Spencer Krug project you like best here), The Unicorns, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor were all born there, and all made their own significant splash in that part of the decade, granting more and more mystique to the word… Montréal.

“There was a lot of instrumental, shoegazer kind of music happening in Montreal. Every single show I went to was someone playing a cymbal with a bow, and it felt like the punkest thing we could possibly do in Montreal was play pop music at that time.” – Win Butler, to Rolling Stone

A quote illustrative of the music that came out of Montreal in that part of the decade, it suggests a maximalism born of frustration and boredom. From the Arcade Fire’s immediate insistence that they belonged in arenas, to Wolf Parade’s hard-driving, almost-wincingly-bright pop, to Sunset Rubdown’s primal, hallucinatory soliloquies, the common thread running through every Montreal band I can remember hearing is a willful rebellion against tedium and normalcy.

Clues carries on this tradition, and with good reason: They were the new project of The Unicorns’ Alden Penner and a member of the pre-Funeral Arcade Fire, and brought armfuls of both of those influences to the recording sessions for Clues. The album combines a broad range of styles from mid-00s indie, and it is apparent they are trying to use those things to build something huge, but it never really seems to take shape.

The album is unfocused in a way that is not so good. An album can be unfocused in at least two ways: One is that every track goes off in a new direction, and the narrative of the album coalseces. The other is in effect here, where each track seems to have some conceit that doesn’t have a lot invested in it. “You Have My Eyes Now” takes quiet shoegaze to a rolling boil, urged on by hollering backing vocals, but the music doesn’t get any bigger as it gets louder. It fails to claim the emotional climax that it spent a few minutes pawing at. The rest of the album goes similarly. Ideas are dropped casually next to each other with no compelling connective tissue, and the problem is that by themselves none of what they have to say or play is all that remarkable. The lovely “Elope” is given no context within which to be as interesting as it should be. For instance, it’s followed by “Cave Mouth”, a wholly uninteresting rock tune that exemplifies how difficult it is to use dynamics well. Like the rest of the album, it is all over the place — up, down, engaging for a moment only to sit down tiredly. The album never shakes this feeling of retreading well-worn musical traditions, and it ends up dragging the whole thing down.

Which is not to say the album is terrible or unredeemable somehow. It is entertaining in a lot of ways, and is certainly never offensive, but it seems like a curiosity.  The best albums are houses. They have an entryway, and then you walk into the foyer, and see the living room peeking through a doorway; the rug needs to be vacuumed and it smells faintly of Glade Plug-Ins. There are faint wine stains on the carpet on the stairs, and the floors are settling and creak and none of the pictures hang level. You can walk up the stairs and lay in the album’s bed. There is inhabitable depth. Clues is like a painting: though its brushstrokes often portray prettiness, it is simply a 2-dimensional representation. David Markson said in one of his books, “If I was the last person alive, and had to burn a Rembrandt for warmth, would that be so terrible?” An album, too, can take you in from the cold, or it can be kindling. Clues is in many ways a lovely painting, but it’ll be the first to go when a cold snap hits.