The Menzingers - Chamberlain Waits

Before I begin:
I'm turning this blog into a zine. It'll be a mash up of music reviews, my comics, personal/political pieces, assorted artwork, and New Yawk scene stuff. I'm also doing a zine covering the history of powerviolence, as well, consisting of interviews, a "best of" list with reviews, and other goodies. I have no idea when this will come to fruition, but you can count on the former seeing the light of day in the not so distant future.

Admittedly, it's been a long-ass time since I had any desire to give the The Menzingers' debut LP a listen. In fact, it wasn't long after completing last year's review that the album's luster wore off and it faded from my priorities list. I guess it would've made sense for me to have rectified this change of heart via an update or something, but well, it's a miracle that I write anything at all, sometimes. Fortunately, the same can't be said about their follow-up, Chamberlain Waits, as it has been percolating in my ears long enough that I feel confident in giving it props. You see, its actually a fantastic concept album detailing the fictional life of Tom Waits' older, seafaring brother, Chamberlain, as he comes to grips with his m,Kkgvd9u2

Ugh, I'm admittedly out of practice with this record review stuff.

Chamberlain Waits features a far more clean and dynamic sound than their debut, and features 10 great-to-fantastic tracks of heartfelt, melodic, folk-tinged "orgcore", and 2 comparative duds. This time around, the band put a greater focus on vocal melody and less on really dated sounding dual scream-singing, and it pays off in spades. If you don't have the right ear for it, I can see Tom May's emotive crooning coming across as a bit overstated at times, but for whatever reason, I love the shit out of even his more warbly moments. With hindsight given by a listen to their new single, I now hear this album as a vaguely transitional one. It seems like the band had grown a bit tired of the gruffer pop-punk sound of the debut and followup EP, and were just beginning to inject more aspects of indie-folk/alternative rock into their repertoire. The results are a fairly smooth mash up of the two halves, and I'd even rate the first 8 tracks here by the arbitrary and mindlessly personal scale of "almost perfect"... well, excepting that cheesy screaming section of "Home Outgrown". Holy dicks are "Times Tables" and "Male Call" great songs, though, both lyrically and musically. I'd hate to pull that boring-as-fuck "worth the price of admission alone" cliche here, but well, if you spank it to the altar of punk news idols, these are two tracks you'd be wise to track down. Okay, here's one:

In reference to a major flaw in the first disc, this one fortunately features no short fuses like "A Lesson In The Abuse Of Information Technology" and "Even For An Eggshell", both of which I listed as standouts in the previous review. Their appeal is about as short lived as how fast they get stuck in your head. There are really only two tracks I don't particularly care for here: "No We Didn't" sounds like that yucky opener on A Lesson... reduced to a more merciful brevity, and "Come Here Often?" is sort of marred by grating/dull vocal patterns. I suppose they're not unlistenable, though, and do in fact vary up the disc's prevailing mood... but so would covers of "ALL!" and "No, ALL!". Does that go without saying? I'm tired since I had to rewrite half this fucking review due to blogspot's inability to consistently save my progress.

Yes, that's why my writing sucks. Because of blogspot.

http://www.mediafire.com/?nk0uwjewzmj

So it seems like my opinion of this album is about the same as my initial thoughts regarding the debut - THIS TIME WITH MORE CONVICTION. Although, wouldn't it be just a chuckle riot if I totally denounced everything I said here in a future review of the band? Ho HO.

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.

try it here
then
buy it here

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:

The Sidekicks - Weight Of Air

I've been meaning to write up a piece about this album for a long time now, but sometimes its hard to form a coherent thought, let alone pen an entry for this dumbass blog.

About 7 months ago, my friend Lindsay invited me to a Tigers Jaw concert in Pennsylvania with three staff members of this blog in tow, oddly enough (Sean, Jack, Blizzard Of '93). I dug the first Tigers Jaw album well enough, and I figured it might be the last time I see any of this crew for a long time, so I decided to hop on board. It was right before I left on a bike trip with no planned conclusion (one that ended far too soon), and I felt obligated to pack in as much party as possible into what little time I had left. The show was opened by a handful of bands I was only quasi-aware of but hadn't heard - Captain We're Sinking, Kite Fight, of course, the band in the header. For whatever reason, while the band was tight as hell and the vocal harmonies were pulled off to great effect, I remember saying something to the effect of "I wish they'd have laid off the college rock stuff and play more of the fast shit -perhaps to cement my presence as a generic punk rock asshole. I didn't bother giving their latest album a spin until a few months after, but if there's any testament to this band's songwriting talent, I was able to recognize 4 songs on Weight Of Air right off the bat as songs they played live.

The Sidekicks are a 4-piece, dual vocal pop-punk/"orgcore" band from California (I think) and have released 2 full lengths and a transitional EP between them. While their debut, So Long, Soggy Dog sounds a lot like what you'd expect from a band doing rounds on punknews with it's quasi-gruff, vaguely alt-rock indebted, and crunchy guitar'd pop-punk sound, Weight Of Air is a more mature, midwestern indie rock kind of album, with that 70's pop jangle and most of the aggression of the first album and preceding EP vanquished. That's not to say this is a trudger, though; almost every song is mid-to-uptempo, but the punk aspects have been toned down considerably and replaced with wonderfully hooky, Replacements-y, collegiate rock with appropriate touch of folk and the aforementioned 70's pop vibe. I apologize if that description could be clearer, but I really can't think of any current bands that encapsulate the same sound as these guys do. They're not reinventing the wheel exactly, but they're a great pastiche with no real contemporaries.
Here's an acoustic rendition of one of my favorite of their songs, "A Healthy Time" done for the Pink Couch Sessions; I feel like the easy transition from electric illustrates the point about their lack of "punkiness" pretty well:

While the songs aren't technical or complex by any means, there are lots of little intricacies that begin to show themselves upon repeat listens, like tinkering with the guitar leads from verse to verse or the cadence of the vocal harmonies; nothing ridiculously innovative, but the real charm here is how naturally the songs fall together and progress, especially with the incredibly hooky vocals and sing-a-long-able choruses. Just top notch songwriting throughout, and a sound that the band seems much more comfortable with than the aggressive pop-punk of their first two releases.

try it here
then
buy it here

I really wish I had gotten into these guys before I saw them live, 'cause it definitely seems like a wasted opportunity now.

Off With Their Heads - Hospitals

Unfortunately for this blog, I'm slipping back out of my strictly punk-ass phase and into another bout with avant-garde, purely noise, improvisational, and otherwise fucked-up tuneage. I think I detailed this bizarre transformation in an old entry on my other blog, but the gist is basically as follows: I spend roughly half my time in phase A, then without warning, morph to phase B. Phase A is populated strictly with pop-punk, hardcore, powerviolence, folk-punk, and indie rock. Phase B is packed with free jazz, krautrock, noise, ambient, proto-metal, power electronics, psychedelic, and other matters of experimental music. While I'm in either phase, I want nothing to do with the music in it's opposing phase. I don't know how to explain it, but that's pretty much what happens every 4 months or so.

So hey, if any staff guys wanna help me fill the 10 entry per month quota, I'd really appreciate the help. I'm still gonna post, but it's probably not going to be as "spirited" as usual (or whatever word you'd use to describe my shitty writing style).

Say, you like nearly cringe-worthy quantities of pain and self-loathing in your pop-punk, right?
Off With Their Heads feature some of the darkest, most angst-laden, almost laughably negative themes I've ever had the fortune of encountering in such an upbeat brand of music, and they're all the better for it. Formed in Minnesota in '02, these guys started off playing somewhat light-weight, keyboard-laden power pop/pop punk before trimming off the cheesiness, speeding up, and cranking the distortion. If you've ever been confounded enough by the stupidity of the term "orgcore" to look up the bands that define it, you've probably seen this band's moniker in there somewhere; in other words, these guys play gruff, aggressive, poppy punk with raw, pack-a-day vocals and an angsty edge. Oh... I guess the "orgcore" term also includes folk-punk, but don't expect Plan-It-X or junk band-esque stuff if you try out The Riot Before or Gaslight Anthem.

Hospitals is an mini-LP (I think it was a 10 inch... do they still make 10 inches? Also: obligatory penis joke) from 2006, and probably my favorite material of theirs. Stylistically, it's really not far from really anything else they've recorded (aside from the aforementioned keyboard bullshit), but it's probably their strongest, catchiest songs paired with the most appropriate production style they've ever used. There's only 8 songs on here, but each one is filler-free and memorable, including the itty-bitty "Idiot", which clocks in at around 25 seconds. Jovial anthems like "Die Today", "Heroin In NYC", and "Your Child Is Dead" all feature some really catchy, poppy melodies unfitting of such gutwrenching themes, but it's never overdone or reeks too strongly of irony. Even though it's obvious these guys have a sense of humor regarding their craft, their songs still contain huge doses of catharsis and emotional resonance, which makes me wonder if any of their lyrics reflect on the writers' personal experience. Maybe I'm just falling for their schtick, but my favorite track almost always gets my eyes to well up; the closing track, "Jackie Lee" slows things down, and is based around one really strong melody that permeates the entire song. I can't exactly relate to the song's lyrics, but they stand out for some reason:

Drunk in a waiting room, I can't fall asleep
Without knowing how you're gonna to be.
Think about what you have,
It isn't that bad.
Sometimes it's so hard to see.

High in a waiting room, I can't fall asleep.
It's not funny how things came to me.
Thought about what you had, it wasn't half bad.
Sometimes it's so hard to see.

My time spent in hospitals makes it seem impossible
To ever walk back through that door.
You've got so much more to do.
I'd trade it all with you.
I'm just a drug addict and nothing more.

The rest of their material is strong, too, especially the EPs featured on their All Things Move Towards Their End compilation, but this is definitely my most listened. I think it's been re-pressed recently, so you know the drill:
Download it here
then
Buy it here