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.