Having largely evoked band leader Conor Oberst folk influences, it’s not surprising that many were taken aback when Bright Eyes released an album* where synthesizers were as prominent as acoustic guitars were elsewhere.
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Record #72: Bright Eyes – LIFTED, or, The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2011)
Much has been about Conor Oberst and his distinctly ragged singing voice and self effacing/exalting lyrics. The range of tags assigned him is “whiny kid who can’t sing” on one end and “the new Dylan” on another. As with all things, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
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Record #70: Brand New – Daisy (2009)
Giving this album its first listen, my roommate looked at me perplexed and asked, “When did Brand New become These Arms are Snakes?” It’s a valid question—Brand New’s first two albums spend so much time putting LiveJournal-worthy insults and teen-movie drama to pop punk, and the music itself gives almost no hints as to what happened between Deja Entendu and The Devil and God to get Jesse Lacey to forget about his beef with Taking Back Sunday and focus inward and upward. But after the somber theology of The Devil and God, Daisy is not a surprise at all.
Record #20: The Ataris – End Is Forever (2001)
And here we are with another piece of nostalgia. If Blue Skies was 8th grade, End Is Forever was 9th. It was my first year of high school. I had friends that were getting into drugs. I made more friends en masse in a month than I did until college, and a lot of those friendships dissolved very quickly, and sometimes with a lot of bitterness. And for the first time in my life, I really, truly hurt someone I cared about. It wasn’t exactly the most fun time in the world.
And End is Forever isn’t the most fun record in the world. Sure, the punk rock tempo remains consistent, and the bass still chugs along in picked 8th notes. But the guitars are more contemplative, the songs are centered more around minor chords, sad keyboards peek through some of the tracks, and the lyrics often border on depressing (even the uptempo pop blitzkrieg of “Bad Case of Broken Heart,” complete with tongue-in-cheek classic rock guitar solo). This melancholy even permeates the cheer-up song, “Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start,” giving the youthful, friendship-championing anthem a between-the-lines temporality.
To my borderline depressed 15-year-old who was trying to figure out who exactly he was anyway, it was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it gave me a place of solace to find solidarity with someone. On the other, it didn’t give me a lot of hope. The “follow your dreams” message of Blue Skies, while still there, is muted considerably. The loudest voice in this album says, “love is a lie, which sucks because it’s the only thing worth living for.”
And when Kris Roe isn’t disparaging his love life or contemplating his loss of youth, he’s throwing up a middle finger at anyone who “just doesn’t understand,” on tracks like “If You Really Want To Hear About It…” or “Teenage Riot” (not to be confused with Sonic Youth’s much more respectable “Teen Age Riot”). These tracks never spoke to me very much. Rather, they hit me like a bucket of cold water to the face on an otherwise cathartic album. Hearing them as an adult makes them sound even more inane and unnecessary. “Song For a Mix-Tape” likewise is a jolting experience, with its brash, unsubtle opening section awkwardly transitioning into an ironic country song by the track’s end. Even though some of the songs are better than anything on Blue Skies, the random, poorly sequenced deviance from the contemplative songs that made this record and the last permanent residents in my Discman causes End Is Forever to suffer in comparison (but not in comparison to So Long Astoria. God, help us).
The side 2 opener, “Fast Times At Drop-Out High”, opens with the most overarching sentiment of these two records: “Alone at last, just nostalgia and I/And we are sure to have a blast.” Admittedly, that’s more true of Blue Skies…I mean the having a blast part.
Whereas that record was attached more to a general era of my life, End Is Forever is attached to too many specific memories (taking a drive through farmland just to get out of our friend’s house, being bored in gym class and singing to myself, blasting one of the songs in the computer lab when the teacher left, writing the lyrics to one of the songs while blowing off a lecture, etc) to be a quick and easy listen.
Music has always been one of my biggest triggers for my memory, and this album is like a machine gun, and for whatever reason it’s only firing out my saddest memories; memories like how much I felt solidarity with Kris Roe in the otherwise-life-affirming “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” when he sings “I’m still waiting for the world to come crashing down ahead.”
Thank God high school doesn’t last forever.
Record #19: The Ataris – Blue Skies, Broken Hearts…Next 12 Exits (1999)
It’s the year 2001. I’m fourteen years old. I wear skating shoes, shorts so long they could be considered baggy capris (except capris haven’t come into fashion yet), and a ball chain choker necklace. My hair is spiked with Elmer’s glue mixed with water.
I’m learning to play the bass guitar, but I’m skateboarding too much to get any real practice in. I’m dating my first girlfriend, until she breaks up with me after five weeks for my best friend, who likes another, older girl what has her driver’s license and a Toyota Tercel.
I like her too.
The whole time, one CD is on repeat in my portable CD player, and my best friend’s boombox, and our older friend’s car stereo…
I’m learning to play the bass guitar, but I’m skateboarding too much to get any real practice in. I’m dating my first girlfriend, until she breaks up with me after five weeks for my best friend, who likes another, older girl what has her driver’s license and a Toyota Tercel.
I like her too.
The whole time, one CD is on repeat in my portable CD player, and my best friend’s boombox, and our older friend’s car stereo…
Blue Skies and Broken Hearts… by The Ataris. In a point in my life where all I was listening to was Christian rapcore and Weird Al, The Ataris were a revelation.
“You mean,” I said to myself, “there’s someone who’s felt exactly the same way as I do right now? And he’s in a band?” The marriage of happy pop-punk with adolescent problems written about in an adolescent language was something that the heavy handed wartime language of Christian nu-metal couldn’t offer me.
After buying Blue Skies, my tastes switched from POD and Project 86 to MxPx, Green Day, and, of course, Blink 182. But The Ataris was always the band that spoke to me the most. Kris Roe writes songs with morals. Not like the, “hey, don’t do drugs,” or “don’t make out with everyone you know” morality being spouted by the armies of Christian pop-punk outfits (I listened to most of them, too…Ghoti Hook, Hangnail, Sidewalk Slam…), but a nonreligious, common sense, post-teen-to-teen morality that reads like an older brother putting his arm around a little punk kid and saying things like, “Don’t ever compromise what you believe,” or, “the choices that we make may involve someone else,” or, more importantly in my own life (as I never listened to it until very late in my life, yet it was stuck in my brain), “If you think you found that one that you really love, make sure they love you back.”
Sentiment wins out over poetry, but there’s a real and legitimate pain there–22 at the time of recording, Roe had already broken up with the mother of his daughter, who lived in Indiana while he had moved to California. This experience wears on him, and despite his attempts to keep things teenaged, the pain of being an absent father rears its wounded head on a few of the tracks.
Musically, there’s nothing surprising here. Heavily distorted guitars, 8th note basslines, and a drummer hyped up on Mountain Dew pounding out 4/4 are all par for the course (barring one acoustic rehash of a song from an earlier album). It’s all a bit amateurish, although the lead guitarist flexes his riffwork during the instrumental passages, keeping the wordless moments interesting.
But what is punk if not amateur? Especially when the lyrics are likewise so unpolished. In the end, it’s the sentiments that run through the album, and the punk rock advice column Kris Roe seems to be writing for that gives this record its appeal to the teenage punk kid that still lives inside of me.
And it’s that teenage punk kid inside me that sang along with every. single. word on the first side of the album (the second half never grabbed me as much).
And it’s the teenage punk kid inside me that made me track down a copy on vinyl as a college student, because every once in a while, you just need to let your inner punk kid have his way.
“You mean,” I said to myself, “there’s someone who’s felt exactly the same way as I do right now? And he’s in a band?” The marriage of happy pop-punk with adolescent problems written about in an adolescent language was something that the heavy handed wartime language of Christian nu-metal couldn’t offer me.
After buying Blue Skies, my tastes switched from POD and Project 86 to MxPx, Green Day, and, of course, Blink 182. But The Ataris was always the band that spoke to me the most. Kris Roe writes songs with morals. Not like the, “hey, don’t do drugs,” or “don’t make out with everyone you know” morality being spouted by the armies of Christian pop-punk outfits (I listened to most of them, too…Ghoti Hook, Hangnail, Sidewalk Slam…), but a nonreligious, common sense, post-teen-to-teen morality that reads like an older brother putting his arm around a little punk kid and saying things like, “Don’t ever compromise what you believe,” or, “the choices that we make may involve someone else,” or, more importantly in my own life (as I never listened to it until very late in my life, yet it was stuck in my brain), “If you think you found that one that you really love, make sure they love you back.”
Sentiment wins out over poetry, but there’s a real and legitimate pain there–22 at the time of recording, Roe had already broken up with the mother of his daughter, who lived in Indiana while he had moved to California. This experience wears on him, and despite his attempts to keep things teenaged, the pain of being an absent father rears its wounded head on a few of the tracks.
Musically, there’s nothing surprising here. Heavily distorted guitars, 8th note basslines, and a drummer hyped up on Mountain Dew pounding out 4/4 are all par for the course (barring one acoustic rehash of a song from an earlier album). It’s all a bit amateurish, although the lead guitarist flexes his riffwork during the instrumental passages, keeping the wordless moments interesting.
But what is punk if not amateur? Especially when the lyrics are likewise so unpolished. In the end, it’s the sentiments that run through the album, and the punk rock advice column Kris Roe seems to be writing for that gives this record its appeal to the teenage punk kid that still lives inside of me.
And it’s that teenage punk kid inside me that sang along with every. single. word on the first side of the album (the second half never grabbed me as much).
And it’s the teenage punk kid inside me that made me track down a copy on vinyl as a college student, because every once in a while, you just need to let your inner punk kid have his way.