Day 84: Four Year Strong – Enemy of the World

Pop-punk is a genre that I love and hate more simultaneously than almost any other. On one hand, it ignites a raging nostalgia in me, bringing me back to driving around and around in my neighborhood in my first car before I had my driver’s license, air coursing through the open windows, blasting Josie (which I still insist is one of the best songs ever written) and feeling awesome. So you get the right power chords together with the right vocals and it makes me smile irrepressibly.

Four Year Strong succeed at that. The group, the second best thing to hail from Worcester, Massachusetts (after the sauce), had two previous full-lengths and an album of covers. I haven’t heard either of the LPs, but I’ve also spent a little time tonight listening to the covers album, and I must say I like these guys. They have that inarticulable quality or combination of qualities: they obviously enjoy their music for its own sake, they are not posturing, they are creative, to excessively emphasize the first point they seem to be having a great time — all of these things combine into refreshingly entertaining, good-spirited pop punk that uplifts and satisfies.

Thankfully, Four Year Strong seem to respect the genre, and rather than continuously re-releasing New Found Glory songs anymore or at all for that matter, and try to expand on the style they’ve committed to. They fold more aggressive, post-hardcore guitars, double bass drum, breakdowns, and riled-up gang vocals, but never seem like they’re trying to come off as hardcore per se. There are choruses aplenty here that encourage the listeners to stand strong, to be themselves, etc. While most bands that bandy that kind of us-and-themism about come off as conceited, self-appointed vanguards of their sacred tenets, Four Year Strong instead captures with their music an infectious, all-inclusive sense of purpose. What’s their purpose? It doesn’t matter.

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.”