The Menzingers - A Lesson In The Abuse Of Information Technologies

Here's an album that took me a long time to get into for some particularly stupid reasons. Have you ever found yourself listening to an album for the first time when suddenly, a track or two will come out of nowhere and make you rock the fuck out like you've heard it a million times? And then you find on subsequent listens that you're waiting impatiently until those fist-pumping anthems start up again, basically ignoring every track that precedes them? Then you get annoyed by the perceived "lack of consistency", forsake the album for other territory, then return wondering what spell you were under jut a few weeks earlier? That pretty much was what happened here. That, and the fact that the production on this particular album is not exactly well-accentuated by the muddying powers of my in-car stereo system. I found the guitar lines getting buried in murk and wrote them off as non-existent for some reason. It's unfortunate to be this dumb.

The Menzingers are yet another "orgcore" band, but what can I say? Though it may be the most retarded and pointless "genre" title ever conceived, it does entail a certain sound quality and style. I also happen to love the shit out of beard-y dudes with gruff voices playing pop-punk way more than skinny "geeks" taking cues from the Dickies, so that's what a lot of this blog will be dedicated to. These guys formed in 2006 in the shithole Scranton, Pennsylvania I got stuck in on my last bike trek. Apparently if you enter Scranton on a bike, but do not carry around a motor vehicle in a capsule like Dragonball, your only hope for leaving that goddamn city is to backtrack about 30 miles and take an unbelievably massive detour AROUND the truly enormous area attached to Scranton. Fuckin' Scranton and it's many attributes. Anyway, A Lesson In The Abuse Of Information Technologies was the band's debut full length from 2007, and while I still don't think its quite as skull bustingly good as their producer, Jesse Cannon ( "I record bands every day and almost all of them are missing something. The Menzingers have it all — the songs, the aggression, the heart, and the passion that most only dream of."), it is a really solid, consistently enjoyable album with only a few weak links.

Like I said before, these guys are an "orgcore" band - a band with two harmonizing gruff vocalist, shards of heartfelt melody, a lot of grittiness, and some scream-a-long moments best suited to live performances and an enthusiastic audience. Apparently they formed from the ashes of a ska-punk band called Bob And The Sagets who I've never heard of, but the ska influence only shines through on the opening track, "Alpha Kappa Falls Off A Balcony" and somewhere in the middle of "Clap Hands Two Guns" (in case you're vehemently opposed to listening to anything that could be considered ska). Unfortunately, the opener is fucking awful, and sounds completely out of place with the rest of the record. It kinda reminds me of the dark-ska moments on Choking Victim's No Gods No Managers, but mixed with lame, attitude heavy rap rock. I have no idea what it's doing on here, nor have I any idea why the band chose it to open the record with it considering it doesn't sound anything like the warm, folk-damaged, pop-punk that dominates the rest of the material.

Aside that, the only track her that could've used a bit of reworking in "Richard Corey", which features a vocal melody that almost brings the song to the emotional peak you can tell the band were aiming for. After those two, the rest is a lot of fun. The tracks of instant accessibility I mentioned before are the awesome title track, "Even For An Eggshell" (check out the reworking of the chorus mid song), and "Straight To Hell", primarily because they feature the most straightforward hooks on the album, but the acoustic numbers "Cold Weather Gear" (albeit it should be twice as long) and "No Ticket", as well as "Ave Maria" are my favorites.

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Overall, really solid enjoyable album by a band who seem to be improving a lot; check out their newest LP, Chamberlain Waits. I haven't given it as much time as this one yet, but overall it seems like everything has been tightened up and improved a decent amount. I guess an acoustic album is also in the works, but the only article I found for it doesn't give much more info on it than I just did. Here's a video for the single accompanying their new album: