Michael Cera Palin – We Could Be Brave | Album Review
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Brain Synthesizer
A little over a year ago, I went to a Michael Cera Palin show and saw the band play an unreleased track called “Murder Hornet Fursona,” which blew everything I’d previously heard from them out of the water. It was the kind of song that I wanted to listen to again and again, and I became very excited at the prospect of the album it was going to be on. As time passed, I started to wonder if my memory of the song’s excellence (or my anticipation for its release) might be overblown; maybe I had just been under the influence of the good vibes that night, or maybe the recorded version wouldn’t live up to what I’d seen. With We Could Be Brave now in hand, I’m very happy to report that those fears were unfounded. “Murder Hornet Fursona” is, in fact, an incredible song, and We Could Be Brave is an astonishing record–a natural progression on all the thrashy emo-punk that came before it.
We Could Be Brave is MCP’s first release since the 2021 one-off “Bono!! Bono!!,” and it’s their first ever LP, coming a full decade after their debut EP Growing Pains back in 2015. Over those ten years, the band has garnered a rabid following and a ton of respect in the scene (their cover of Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy” has been particularly canonized), which means that there’s been an enormous sense of anticipation for this record. With this anticipation comes a fair amount of pressure, but if MCP felt that, it’s not apparent in the work. Though longtime fans of the band will undoubtedly be pleased with what they hear on We Could Be Brave, it doesn’t feel at all like fan service; instead, what we have is a collection of songs created with a strong, often furious, viewpoint by a band who clearly believes 100% in what they’re doing.
Photo by Spencer Isberg
The headline for me on this one compared to what we’ve seen previously from MCP is that it’s just way, way bigger. Some of this has to do with the size (going from a couple loosies of and fifteen-minute EPs to a 50-minute LP), but much of this has to do with the production, which boosts and cleans up what’s needed while keeping the raw edge that makes MCP a great live band. Too often lately, I feel like people are applying too much sandpaper to their mixes, the end results are the sonic equivalent of this smooth PB&J, and I was very happy not to find that here. Elements like the guitars on “Gracious” and “Crypto” are allowed to be not just big, but straight-up noisy, and the record is all the better for it.
A lot of what I love here is exemplified by “Murder Hornet Fursona,” the track that got me so hyped for the record in the first place. The first thing that popped out to me when I could finally listen closely to the song was Jon Williams’ bass, which has just the right amount of saturation for its slides to pop through and hit you while still allowing for smoothness on the longer walking lines. This choice is illustrative of the mixing throughout the album, which always seems to know just where the line is to sound full without being overbearing. I also love the kind of talk-singing style we get from Elliott Brabant in the first verse, with dense lines coming out with a percussive force.
This photograph is a misprint
A psychographical error
Uncanny valleys hold distance
What do you see looking back at you?
At this point, the song feels sufficiently big, but as it moves onto the next section, it grows even larger as another distorted guitar joins the fray. Though that guitar falls away again in the second verse, all the remaining instruments are more frantic, with Brabant now screaming, “If you are what you eat, I’m more man than you’ll ever be.”
As I continued to listen through We Could Be Brave, I found that my ear was again and again drawn to the bass. One place this happened was on “Gracious,” where the bass starts with a fairly simple walking line under country-sounding guitars before a breakdown takes us back into more familiar emo territory, the bass simplifying to support heavy distorted guitar chords and thunderous drums. After this, the guitar breaks into more hectic arpeggios, and the bass joins in, feeling very much its equal in the ensuing dance. It’s nice to see a bass player get noodly with a guitarist instead of just fading into the back, and it makes for such a fun listen. I also loved near the end of “Despite,” where there are some really sweet-sounding lines higher up on the neck, which are a little bit reminiscent of Mark Hoppus on “Carousel.”
The way that Brabant’s vocal style shifts throughout the album is another big highlight, bouncing from singing to talking to screaming without missing a beat. Though their voices are pretty different, it reminds me a bit of Microwave’s Nathan Harvy, who you can count on to sound like multiple different people throughout a song’s runtime. One place I noted this in particular was “Tardy,” where a screaming section is followed by a sick vocal harmony around the song’s midpoint, all totally seamless. If I had to pick one flavor of Brabant’s voice that I like best though, I would go with the way it soars out on hooks, particularly “Wisteria,” which was the album’s first single. Great song, great vocal performance.
I want to be clear that earlier, when I described a section of lyrics from “Murder Hornet Fursona” as dense, I didn’t mean it in a derogatory way. Those lyrics, and a good chunk of the words throughout the record, are packed so tightly with syllables that noting their density feels like the best way to describe them; it gives a lot of the lines this really cool and distinct rhythm. For example, there's this line on “A Broken Face” that goes, “An unsteady diet of / What this crime yields and on / Sweat drips to grease the wheel, churned for drying tongues.” These aren’t stock emo lyrics, and they’re also not just literary for the sake of being literary; the way that the actual words themselves sound gives as much of a payoff as what they mean, and it’s something I don’t usually notice in the genre. If this was all the result of our ten-year wait, I’ll gladly wait another decade to hear what MCP will do next, though hopefully, we won’t have to wait quite that long.
Josh Ejnes is a writer and musician living in Chicago. He has a blog about cassette tapes that you can find here. He also makes music under the name Cutaway Car.
