Dear Haggus,
Remember the first time we got drunk at your parents' house
and then meandered down Chapel Street to Uni Mart, where Nuclear Knee was
trying to throw down with a substitute teacher?
Or the time that kid wanted to fight us because I kept
singing, "Just the Way It Is, Baby" by the Rembrandts?
Or the night we ended up in the woods eating matzoh from a
backpack after some douche started chucking beer bottles at our heads?
Wait – that last one was with Travis.
Anyway, this album is kind of like that: either it means
something to you or it doesn't.
I'm addressing this to you because I know you'll know
exactly what I'm talking about.
The Wonder Years are like the Menzingers, or Banner Pilot,
or Weston. But they're not. There's enough grit in the lead vocals, and the
bass is just burpy enough, and the guitars are just the right amount of loud
that some stretches of The Greatest
Generation listen like a dirtier Lawrence Arms tune. But even when the
Lawrence Arms are at their sappiest, they sound grizzled. The Wonder Years, on
the other hand, sometimes wander too far into the Emo Badlands and I'm not sure
how I feel about it.
Take the track, "Passing Through a Screen Door." Tell me that
shout isn't bangin’. The whole thing is bangin’. But I keep hearing this vocal
fry, this ‘yuhh’ in the middle of every lyric. "I keep a flashlight/And a
small knife/In the corner of my bed stand/I keep a flashlight/And the train times/But
you wouldn't understand/How could you understand?" What starts off as a
great, crusty verse about the house you lived in, across from the crackheads,
taking public transportation two hours both ways to a shitty job at a call
center, almost ends up sounding petulant. It doesn't ruin the song, but, I
don't know – that whine – it's there. And you'll drink a few beers, and I'll
drink a few beers, and you'll say I sound like an old man, and I'll say you
sound like a fourteen-year-old-girl, and we'll agree to disagree: Blink-182
isn't punk, but, with the right people, it's damn fine drinking music.
Shit. I ended up waist-deep in the weeds of millennial emo:
it’s 2 AM and I’m listening to Fallout Boy, Yellowcard, Fenix TX – all this
crap you know I can't stand, just to get at what, exactly, Wonder Years sound
like at their weakest. Maybe the fact that I can’t put a finger on it means
they're unique – they just sound like The Wonder Years. Or maybe it means, now
and again, they sound like a plastic sack full of all the candy-coated,
turn-of-the-century junk that "real punks" weren't supposed to listen
to.
But, you know what? Jimmy Eat World: not half bad. I mean,
now that I don't have to worry about whether I have a seat at the lunch table.
There's this song, "Devil in my Bloodstream." It’s sort of a
microcosm of the whole album. It starts off with overwrought piano and sobby
vocals. The drums, they emerge, a soft, tender snare; a few bass thumps
punctuate the sad, sad, whatever. And just when you're ready to count this out
as a terrible Something Corporate ripoff, the vocals tear into your head and
you're back at 99 Custer, ready to applaud by punching the air vent hanging
overhead. But that’s followed by a layered, Simple Plan-esque heap of guitars
and woah-ing; now, hold on – it gets crunchy again, and you’re throwing a fist
up, ready to belt your way through the chorus; but wait – the song finishes
with a lonely, palm-muted guitar, a pensive organ, and sincere vocals. And you
know they’re just aching to get laid.
I wish this record had more gruff, more filth. It's almost there.
I wish it were more like the Dopamines. Or the Transgressions. The good parts
are good. You're cleaning it out from under your fingernails, at least. The
parts that suck sound like a Drive-Thru Records sampler from the summer you
almost didn't graduate because you couldn't draw a shed.
You know how Masked Intruder sound kind of boring on CD, but
were off the chizzang-fer-rizzang at 99? The Wonder Years would be insane at a
basement show.
So we’ll say this: let’s buy two rings of tallboys, get sloppy,
and listen to the Wonder Years. Let's make it mean something. Let's do
something stupid while these songs are still buzzing around our brains, because
we're gonna be dead in a few decades, and I refuse to lie there, wheezing out
my last breath, thinking, "I'm sure glad I quit listening to juvenile
music, strung myself up on a necktie, cut the grass on weekends, and nursed a
comatose boner for the rest of my life."
I know you know what I'm talking about.
Love,
Wendall the Wizard
Grade: B
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