More Punk Than You

Want to know a secret?  I’m more punk than you.  That’s right, I said it.  I have got to be more punk than you.  You know why?  Because while the counter-culture was changing musical history, I was moving counter to the counter culture.  That’s right, I made it 26 years into my life without ever really listening to Nirvana.  I even visited the Rock and Roll Museum in Seattle and saw the exhibition “Taking Punk To The Masses”, which featured a ton of rare memorabilia from Nirvana’s torrid past.  Despite all that, I still possessed not more than a passing interest in the band.  I showed more interest in the fact that Sub Pop Records had played a substantive part in Nirvana’s explosion into the music world.  Sub Pop would later go on to release one of my favorite records, Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary, as well as some other notable albums like a Death Cab For Cutie single and The Postal Service’s one and only LP.

 

I knew the general details about Nirvana.  They played grunge and Kurt Cobain was a tragic rock star, Courtney Love is a whore, and Dave Grohl would go on to form the Foo Fighters with one of the guys from Sunny Day Real Estate and all the rest of that jazz.

Perhaps one of the things that put me off of Nirvana was how many people I saw wearing Nirvana t-shirts in high school and what those people were generally like.  I still see these same kind of people.  From the too-cool-for-words poser strolling through Wal-Mart to the way too young to be at a punk rock show kid wearing his black Nirvana shirt from Hot Topic.  Not that I would choose to listen to (or not listen to) certain music just because of its fan base but the only other t-shirts I used to see as much were Slipknot and Insane Clown Posse.  I may have just gotten a false connotation of douche baggery in my head.

I knew who Kurt Cobain was.  When I bought the vinyl re-issue of Jawbreaker’s seminal album, Dear You, I loved the picture on the inside of Kurt Cobain sitting there wearing the classic Jawbreaker shirt with the Morton salt girl on it.

I had heard Nirvana songs, mostly as interpreted by the bands I listen to.  John Nolan had recorded a cover of “Drain You” when he was in Straylight Run.  Yellowcard had provided a cover of “All Apologies”.  Ben Gibbard even made "All Apologies" a part of his set list for his solo acoustic tour.  There were numerous bands that had recorded covers that meant nothing to me.  I figured that Nirvana must have been pretty important but, outside of that, I still didn't really care.

Flash forward to me sitting here at work, listening to the all-too-awful pop station playing on the radio in the cubicle in front of me and a 90's nostalgic alternative internet radio station playing from the cubicle behind me.  It's not a diverse collection of music, certainly.  You are bound to hear Sublime and Nirvana at least three times an hour, amidst other music like Red Hot Chili Peppers.  I began paying a little bit closer attention to the Nirvana songs.  I don't know what the point of no return was.  I don't know when something clicked.  But it did.

All of a sudden, I could not get enough Nirvana.  Nevermind became my new favorite record.  I read all about the history of the band and their discography.  I now understood the fascination and why the music means so much to so many.

It's not that Nirvana were the sole purveyors of a new kind of music called Grunge.  At its heart, it is still punk rock, hence the name of the exhibit "Taking Punk To The Masses".  Some people still don't understand the Nirvana thing,  It's really quite simple - they wrote really beautiful pop songs that were absolutely filthy, dirty and sloppy.  The melodic differences between Nirvana and say, The Beatles, is really not as big as you would think.  Perhaps that is where Kurt Cobain's biggest strength resided, in his ability to craft perfect little gems from waves of noise.

Nirvana proved that the alternative could crossover into the mainstream.  Who could have imagined that an album recorded by a bunch of punks from Aberdeen, WA (a town of no more than 20,000 people) would go on to sell over 30 million copies worldwide?  It was all the justification that the music scene needed to show that alternative music in general could top one of pop's bestselling "artists", Michael Jackson, on the Billboard Charts.  It's a trend that would continue throughout the early and mid 90's.  The late 90's would grant success to horrible "alternative" music like Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, and every other kind of ridiculous nu-metal, rap hybrid.  Even as we crossed into the new millennium, the alternative shifted more towards pop punk.  Despite existing for near a decade, bands like Green Day began selling more records than they could have ever imagined.  Thus, the trend has continued, for better or (mostly) worse.

It is interesting that I would discover Nirvana on the 20th anniversary of the release of Nevermind.  Never having listened to them before and then suddenly being inundated with their legacy is a strange feeling.  All at the same time, my favorite artists were popping up with tributes and compilations celebrating the seminal album.  Frank Turner appeared on Kerrang!'s Nevermind Forever, where he contributed "On A Plain".  SPIN also put out a compilation called Newermind.  Kevin Devine even recorded Nevermind in its entirety and released it for free.  It's truly amazing how similar his voice sounds to Kurt's.  There have been several bands that have recorded live Nirvana tribute shows, including Weezer (under the pseudonym Goat Punishment) and the always fun Arrogant Sons of Bitches.

After 20 years, Nirvana's legacy continues to grow.  As the artists that inspire us nowadays expose us to the artists that inspired them, newer generations will continue to hear about bands like Nirvana.  I'm just sad that it took me this long to give them a real chance.

Yeah, I might be rehashing what everyone has known for two decades now, but it's still new to me.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to listen to this new band I just discovered.  I think they're going to be huge.  Their name is kind of weird though... The Smashing Pumpkins, I think?  Keep an eye on these guys.

First Impressions: Say Anything - Anarchy, My Dear

Ah, the new Say Anything album.  Scheduled to be released on March 13th, 2012, this album leaked two months early, to the day.  To provide context for the band, I wrote a recap which can be found in this blog's previous entry.  When describing the new record, lead singer Max Bemis said the following: "Anarchy, My Dear is our first attempt to write a true ‘punk’ record; thematically speaking, it’s a collection of songs about subverting society and destroying the boundaries humankind has placed upon ourselves both physically and in our minds. Coincidentally, it also happens to be the first record we’ve made in years where we had total freedom to explore our ‘edgier’ side and present a raw picture of what the band is truly about onstage."

And now for my first impressions of the eagerly anticipated album:

The record begins with a song of rebellion... "Burn A Miracle" was a fantastic choice for a lead single and it's one of the strongest tracks on the entire album.  It's rough around the edges, raw and abrasive.  The lyrics play off of the similar sounding chorus "burn america".  It vacillates between clever stanzas like "Pleasured himself to the music / Of well-dressed, inbred college students / As his girlfriend starved on the alter / To his blog of the sickening things he would call her." and semi-groan-worthy phrases like "I saw Stereohead \ They looked a lot like the same band \ but they were deaf \ And their singer \ kept twirling around \ on a slick middle finger." 

The album loses its momentum almost immediately after track 1.  Track 2, "Say Anything" sounds like a half-baked Painful Splits reject.  Yes, the band Say Anything now has an album and a song named Say Anything.  The song is a repetitive acoustic guitar based song that uses the same chords and progressions that Max Bemis has played to death.  For an album supposedly about "subverting society", there are an awful lot of these "I'd do anything for you" songs about his wife.  I find it hilarious that when a video came out of Max playing this song at an acoustic show prior to its release, everybody loved it and said they couldn't wait until the full band album version.  Who could have known that the album version would still be almost entirely an acoustic guitar with a tiny bit of bass and drums thrown in?

"Night's Song" is the third track and it also doesn't resonate with me at all.  It's strange though - this song features some of the most impressive, poetic lyrics on the entire album, yet I don't really care for it at all.  It feels very generic.  The verses feature wonderful words like "Under the sun god's stare, I wince and blossom hives / Counting the fractions of day, rotting away / As businessmen just drink away their eyes / But when the stars once shy, come bloom and blanket earth" but the end of the chorus, "praise the night / The only time I feel alright" just feels like it's been done before.  This may be one of the songs that grows on me in time.  The very first time I listened to the album, my immediate response was one of repulsion.  It was an eww-what-is-this kind of listen.  Thankfully, a number of the songs did begin to grow on me with repeat listenings.

Anarchy, My Dear takes an unexpected turn with the fourth track, "Admit It Again".  The spiritual successor and sonic sequel to the closing track on ...Is A Real Boy, "Admit It!!!", this song picks up where the other left off and turns its ire towards more modern atrocities, like Rihanna.  I really like this song with its lines overflowing with vitriol.  Max delivers biting stabs with lyrics like "Your entire facade is a line that you feed to anorexic actresses / Who would have laughed at your jacked-up Navajo haircut, less than a decade ago."  The song does have its flaws.  Max's seemingly bizarre refusal to include swear words on the album (despite their obvious inclusion in live shows) comes to a ridiculous and embarrassing head when he delivers the line "I'm sure you're proud that you've usurped the "popular kids table" / You son of a.. [mumble]"  It feels so awkward to have such an enraged bitter song and then to pull a punch and stop short of calling someone a "son of a bitch", which at that point is not even that bad.  The song starts off with the phrase "lecherous douche" so why refuse to include the word "bitch"?  In fact, why is it that Max has stopped swearing on Say Anything's albums entirely?  Is it mere coincidence that the swearing on the albums stopped the moment he married Sherri Dupree?  Doubtful.  The album before her had a song called "This Is Fucking Ecstasy" and not a single cuss word has made it onto an album since then.

It also pains me to have such an engrossing song and then to have a large part of the chorus be the refrain "And the crap reigns/rains down".  You couldn't think of something a little less cringe-worthy for such an otherwise great song?  Little things like that tend to mar the experience as a whole.

The song "So Good" follows and it's a little slower in tempo.  It falls in the category of sweet love song directed towards his wife, like a couple of the other songs.  The lyrics are esoteric but adorable.  His wife, Sherri, provides backing vocals towards the end and they actually compliment the song.  Unlike her ridiculous vocals on "Cemetery", off of 2009's eponymous album, her vocals on this song never cross into overbearing or oppressive territory.  They just perfectly compliment Max's singing.

The album picks up in tempo with "Sheep".  This song reminds me a lot of  "She Won't Follow You" off of 2009's Say Anything.  It's one of those songs that isn't really all that great of a song but it will somehow find a way to reside in your head longer than you'd like.  It gets exceedingly repetitive with the line "It's my life and I'm living without you" with the rest of the lyrics just being cliché lines that fade into the background.  Aside from being repetitively catchy, I haven't found a saving grace for this song. 

"Peace Out" is one of the worst songs that the band has ever created.  I don't know what their creative thought process was behind this song but they failed catastrophically.  It begins with a softly plucked guitar and devolves from there.  It is ironic that Max would choose to include a line like "A curse of such a fetching fraud without a soul to speak / Inspired thirty songs I could have written in my sleep" and then follows it with horrible lines like "You snort a line of syphilis and run the marathon / Your mentally deficient friends just ask you what you're on" and the even worse chorus, "Oh I'll be fine / Sever this for all time / I'll laugh it off when this ends / You can just go get high with all of your dumb friends."  As if the song hadn't been lame enough, the band chose to end it with an instrumental outro that lasts for over a minute.  It sounds exactly like the Asian influenced crap that you'd hear in a massage parlor.  The phrase "out of place" doesn't even begin to cover this ending.

"Overbiter" follows and I actually like this song.  It's got a very fun vibe to it, accentuated with a piano riff.  This feels like it's the other bookend to "So Good" since the chorus to this song includes the repetition of the line "I want it bad, so bad, I want it so bad".  Sherri's vocals make another appearance providing background vocals to the choruses.  They almost derail the song when Sherri gets her own verse to sing but the song is somehow able to overcome that blemish.  Otherwise it's incredibly catchy and fun.  The prominence of both of their voices leads me to believe that this would have made a better song for their husband-and-wife side project, Perma.

Track 9 is "Of Steel", a superhero themed song that also falls into the grouping of love songs directed at his wife.  Remember when this was supposed to be an album about anarchy?  This song doesn't catch me at all.  Repeat listens have yielded nothing new.  For now, it's about as middle of the road boring as the album gets.

The album closes strong with tracks 10 and 11.  Track 10 is the title track, "Anarchy, My Dear".  This is a love ballad directed at anarchy itself (or herself, in this case).  I really like how this song comes together.  The inclusion of piano was an excellent choice and it breaks up some of the instrumentation.  The way the song crescendos is perfect.  The lyrics and their personification of anarchy bring a smile to my face, save for the line about god which misses the point of anarchy entirely.

The closing track is "The Stephen Hawking", a seven and a half minute opus that might just be my favorite song on the album.  It transitions seamlessly between different aural textures and Max's lyrics shine brilliantly.  The melodies and musicianship are superb and it leaves you wanting more, which is about as much as you can ask for from a concluding track.  It doesn't drag on and it finishes proudly.

Ultimately, I think the few standout songs from Anarchy, My Dear will continue to grow on me.  But it won't have the same staying power as their self-titled album, which I played to death.  My wife was tired of hearing that album because I couldn't bring myself to take it out of the CD player - it was just too much fun and too good to stop listening to.  This album doesn't evoke anywhere near the same level of enjoyment.  I definitely can't consider it their worst effort to date but it's also nowhere near their best, even if you exclude ...Is A Real Boy.

The album, as a whole, is a disappointment.  There are a couple of the songs that shine as unique and unexpected surprises and they will remain in my playlist for a good while, but they were the minority on this album.  My biggest gripe about the album is that it doesn't really sound or feel like a Say Anything album.  Now I'm not about to blame Yoko Dupree... ok, maybe I will.

Say Anything: The Band, The Man, The Drama

With Say Anything's new album, Anarchy, My Dear, leaking so incredibly early and with them embarking on an amazing tour that is coming nowhere near Las Vegas (seriously, Say Anything with the openers being Kevin Devine and the Goddamn Band and Fake Problems?  Wow.), I figured it was time to do a recap of Say Anything, their drama and how they got to this point.

I'll preface this by saying that I like Say Anything.  I'm not shy about it - though I've never really cared for lead singer Max Bemis with all of his religious shtick, bipolar publicity and his now all-too-publicized marriage to Sherri Dupree.  Let's recap, shall we?

2001: The band releases their first full length entitled Baseball. It achieves virtually no success and is quietly forgotten about.  Say Anything won't begin playing any songs off of this album again until their Summer 2010 Tour, when they dust off "Colorblind".  They've just now begun talking about re-issuing the album, now that they've secured the rights to their past albums via Equal Vision Records.

2004: The band's critically acclaimed Doghouse Records debut, ...Is A Real Boy, is released.  It's awesome but it doesn't gain a ton of traction yet.  Critical acclaim starts growing as Max Bemis' health deteriorates.  He battles his bipolar disorder and drug addictions, which almost destroys the band as five of his bandmates leave in 2005.  My first introduction to the band was reading all of these articles about them and learning about nothing except for Bemis' mental issues.

2006: ...Is A Real Boy is re-issued with the bonus EP ...Was A Real Boy, an equally impressive collection of songs.  Chris Carrabba (of Dashboard Confessional) incorporates Say Anything lyrics from the song "Woe" into his live performances of the song "Remember To Breathe".  A ton of people (including myself) finally catch on to the music.  ...Is A Real Boy is an amazing collection of energetic and cathartic pop punk tunes.

2007: The band releases the two disc, 27 song album In Defense Of The Genre.  It features a ton of guest vocalists from most of the major bands in the scene, including Taking Back Sunday, Paramore, My Chemical Romance, Saves The Day and Dashboard Confessional.  The album has some amazing songs and about an album's worth of crap I haven't listened to since.

2009: The band gears up for the release of their eponymous album.  Initially, Max says that the album will be "about God and how we relate to Him."  Up to this point, Max is a very blatant Jew, who has included songs and lyrics about his Judaism.  Eventually, the focus of the album is shifted and they release a stellar album that is my album of the year.

But 2009 also saw some of the more torrid details of the personal life of Max Bemis.  It was in 2009 that Max announced that he had married Sherri Dupree.  I'm going to break from this journalistic narrative only to say this: I don't like the Dupree Sisters.  I don't like their band, Eisley.  I think they are crazy fascist Christian bitches who are ugly, untalented, way too skinny, and were fucking their way around the scene until they found some modicum of success.  If you want the hilarious Star Wars themed video of what I'm about to summarize, go here.

Of the Dupree sisters, Chauntelle ends up engaged to Taking Back Sunday frontman Adam Lazzara.  She can't really accept him for who he is because, like all of the Dupree siblings, she is very religious and Christian.  So the two split up, the engagement is called off and Adam writes the absolutely stellar "Everything Must Go" featuring the lyrics "You quote the good book / when it's convenient / but you don't have the sense / no, you don't have the sense / to tie your tangled tongue / instead you slash it through the mud."

One of the other Dupree sisters, Sherri Dupree, steals the spotlight as the worst offender of scene-whoring.  She began her attempt to conquer the scene by going out with Brand New frontman Jesse Lacey.  He fell head over heels for her and actually proposed.  She turned him down, not wanting to move too fast.  Rumor has it that cheating was involved in the split that followed - they both seem like horrible people personally, judging by their actions, so I'd be willing to bet they both cheated.  Shortly thereafter Sherri decided to move on to Chad Gilbert, the guitarist in New Found Glory.  Chad Gilbert actually provided guest vocals for one of the tracks on Say Anything's In Defense Of The Genre, as did Paramore's singer, Hayley Williams (which will become relevant in a moment).  After being married for a mere 11 months, Chad and Sherri were divorced.  Chad moved on to Hayley Williams, seven years his junior.

In the wake of their divorce, Sherri's mom Kim took to the Eisley message board to post the following:

"So, now that you guys have word from Sherri, we will lock any thread
that tries to pry into this very sensitive and heart breaking matter.

As you read, Sherri does not have the power to change a heart... and
this has hit our family hard. Our family's belief - to marry and grow old
together. Obviously, not everyone in this equation had the same grasp.

We appreciate your thoughts, prayers and sensitivity at this time."

It should be noted that Chad Gilbert is also a devoutly religious man.

And Sherri?  She kept on truckin' along until she found Max Bemis.  Suddenly, Max was no longer Jewish.  Yes, that's right.  The man who had written such Say Anything songs as "Shiksa (Girlfriend)" and "Died A Jew" and lyrics such "I forgot all the rules my rabbi taught me in the old 'schul'" is now unabashedly Christian.  Nothing like changing for love.  Max even included the lyric "Condemn my race to genocide if it meant that I could lay with you" on the new album.

Around this time, Chad Gilbert decided to post some of the solo songs that he had been working on up on his web-site.  One of the songs, "Thinkin' Bout Her", is a song that laments how poorly he was treated in a relationship and that, in hindsight, he's happy that it's over.  Leave it to Sherri to assume that the song was about her (Ok, it probably was. Either way, it was Chad's right to be able to write whatever he wants.  He's a musician, for fuck's sake.)  Sherri's new husband, Max Bemis, did not take too kindly to the song.  He lashed out on twitter "today i heard the worst new music i've heard since vanilla ice attempted to make rock music. don't quit your day job, dude."  He then followed it with a way-too-long-to-read (hey! I know how to write stuff like that too!) response that apologized to fans but not to Chad.

Max also managed to start a feud with Tim Kinsella (of Cap'n Jazz, Joan of Arc, Owls, a million other Chicago bands) regarding an opinion piece that Tim published in Alternative Press.  Tim is the brother of Mike Kinsella (of Cap'n Jazz, Owls, American Football, Owen, a million other Chicago bands) and it was his opinion that terrible bands should do the world a favor and all just break up.  Max took it personally and blah blah blah.  More drama that I'm not getting into here.  Despite all of this and how wrong Max was during every incident, I still really like Say Anything.

________________________________________________________________________

2009: This year also saw the release of Max Bemis' side project with Chris Conley, the lead singer of Saves The Day. The project, entitled Two Tongues, actually produced an enjoyable full length.  I'd never been much of a Saves The Day fan but their voices worked well together.

2010: Max Bemis embarks on several solo tours.  He decides to start recording the songs that he's writing on his own.  He doesn't want it to be an official project but more of a "low-key sort of release" to get the songs out there.  He calls this side effort Max Bemis and the Painful Splits.  For the most part, there is a very obvious reason why none of these songs are on Say Anything's actual albums.  They are beyond repetitive and the chords are reused to extinction.

2011: The band signs to Equal Vision Records and posts an entry on their website detailing how thrilled they are to be working with a record label that is giving them total artistic freedom.  They feel like this will be the most true record they can write and record.

2012: The album leaks two months early.  Strange that such a thing had never happened with their other record labels.