Total Retention: 20 Years of The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America

Vagrant Records

Something I didn’t realize until I started writing this piece is that [adult swim] is responsible for introducing me to not just one, but two of my all-time favorite bands. When the dark claymation comedy Moral Orel entered its final season in 2008, it incorporated a swath of songs by The Mountain Goats in its soundtrack, which is where I first heard John Darnielle’s distinctive voice cry, “I hope you die, I hope we both die!” One year earlier, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters was released along with an accompanying soundtrack CD that I completely wore out at the time. On a compilation mostly full of comedic tie-ins and extreme metal, one curious track that appeared on the album was “Girls Like Status” by The Hold Steady. The song is a B-side from their 2006 album Boys and Girls in America that helped score the film’s end credits and immediately stood out to me thanks to another one of indie rock’s most distinctive voices, Craig Finn. Like an inscrutable message that wouldn’t be demystified until my next year of grade school, Finn kicks off the song’s bridge with, “It was song number three on John’s last CD, ‘I’m gonna make it through this year if it kill me,’ and it almost killed me,” nodding to The Mountain Goats’ scene-defining “This Year” from 2005’s The Sunset Tree. That voice and those cryptic lyrics led me to Boys And Girls In America, which I quickly fell in love with at an age where I was almost certainly too young to understand the trials and tribulations of its cast. It primed me for the 2008 release of Stay Positive, and sparked a lifelong obsession with the world’s greatest bar band.

A few years back, I got to document my weekend with The Hold Steady and The Mountain Goats in Chicago, who teamed up for two glorious shows with Dillinger Four, the celebrated Minneapolis punk band that also get namechecked in “Girls Like Status.” Finn, Darnielle, and D4’s Patrick Costello brought the song to life together for the first time during the second night’s encore, sixteen years after I first heard it. I have spent twelve massive nights with The Hold Steady so far, and if I had to narrow it to the top five, both of those co-headlining shows would be up there. I would also include their Empty Bottle performance in 2017 and the miraculous two times I’ve seen the band play Boys and Girls in its entirety: first in 2016 at Riot Fest for its tenth anniversary, then earlier this constructive summer when they returned to Chicago to celebrate it again for the twentieth. 

Long before it first turned double-digits, I’ve always considered Boys And Girls to be my second favorite album of all time, right behind the unbeatable Raw Power by Iggy And The Stooges. The reasons it’s resonated with me so strongly in the last two decades are likely the same ones that countless members of the Unified Scene have. The sordid storylines of the titular boys and girls, the anthemic choruses that Finn and company pull off so well, and a strong collection of tattooable lyrics. To offer just a few:

“He was drunk and exhausted, but he was critically acclaimed and respected.”

“Lost in fog and love and faithless fear. I've had kisses that make Judas seem sincere.”

“He was rough around the edges. He'd been to school but never finished. He'd been to jail but never prison.”

The legacy of Boys and Girls in America highlights the best and brightest of 2000s indie rock, a band who worked through two other great records to make their first perfect one, and remains a celebrated record for both die-hard fans like myself and casual connoisseurs of the era – eleven songs of romance, challenges, and bad decisions amongst a fictional youth.

Boys and Girls in America’s opening blast is “Stuck Between Stations,” which kicks off with a U2-esque riff that eases the listener in before a quick mention of the album’s title, buried beneath a beat poetry reference from Finn: “There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right, Boys and girls in America — they have such a sad time together.” I believe one of Finn’s sharpest lyrics remains “She was a really cool kisser, and she wasn't all that strict of a Christian. She was a damn good dancer, but she wasn't all that great of a girlfriend.” The descriptors of the characters captured in his songs are a hallmark of his writing on any record he leads, from the early days of Lifter Puller to his expansive solo discography.

The next song “is about a boy, a girl, and a horse,” as Finn always introduces it live. “Chips Ahoy!” is a song only The Hold Steady could write, featuring some of the best keyboard work from Franz Nicolay, another one of the band’s defining elements across this record and many others in their discography. Nicolay boisterously bursts and slickly shreds with co-guitarist Tad Kubler on the album’s most uproarious and overlooked cut, “Same Kooks,” and the keyboard and guitar trade-offs in “Hot Soft Light” come off like a Marshall stack version of Wilco’s Nels Cline and Mikael Jorgensen.

The album’s title appears again in the ballad “First Night,” where Finn also postures, “we can't get as high as we got on that first night.” There are many lyrics throughout Boys and Girls that reference getting high: “How am I supposed to know if you’re high if you won’t let me touch you?” on “Chips Ahoy!”; “I wasn’t there, I was blind, high, I was scared” and “There are guys with the wild eyes when they ask you to get high” on “Hot Soft Light;” “It only gets inconvenient when you want to get high alone” on “You Can Make Him Like You.” As a straightedge guy, something about the way Finn describes his characters getting high in all these scenarios is extremely alluring. In some ways, it makes me feel like “high” means more than he says, although maybe that’s just my untainted brain projecting, and truly is just about a bunch of kids getting high. The same thing goes for liquor, like in the epic singalong, (oh shit!) “Party Pit,” where the narrator is “Gonna walk around and drink some more, gonna walk around, gonna walk around, gonna walk around and drink.” 

Of course, with the kind of substances The Hold Steady spill out on the page, there comes plenty of interpersonal turmoil and awkward human truths. There’s always other boys and always other boyfriends on “You Can Make Him Like You,” one of the record’s best hooks, and “Massive Nights” has become one of The Hold Steady’s trademark tunes, with the band naming yearly residencies after it in various cities. “We had some massive nights, we had some crushing lows, we had some lusty little crushes, we had those all-ages hardcore matinee shows.”

I have only seen The Hold Steady play “Citrus” in the Boys and Girls in America setlists, and on one hand it’s a shame they don’t bust it out more, but on the other, it's all the more special when they do. The brief acoustic cut brings the same energy as the full-band rockers do while showcasing some of Finn’s most tender lyrics: “I see Judas in the hard eyes of the boys working the corners, I feel Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers.” Late-album highlight “Chillout Tent” usually gets the same treatment, due to its need for male and female call-and-response vocals in the chorus. The original recording featured Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum and Elizabeth Elmore of the criminally underrated Chicago band Sarge. When played live, the band will pull in friends and peers to bring the dueling vocals to life, like at their Riot Fest 2016 set where the girl in America’s vocals were handled by Jessica Louise Dye of High Waisted. At a multi-generation indie rock romp at their Salt Shed B&G set this year, The Hold Steady borrowed vocalists from each of their openers: Alicia Bognanno of Bully and Patrick Stickles of Titus Andronicus.

The album’s finale, “Southtown Girls,” has always been one of my favorite positive jams due to its odd but very, very Hold Steady lyrics. When Finn sings, “Southtown girls won’t blow you away, but you know that they’ll stay,” my young mind heard it as: those girls in America won’t blow you off; they won’t leave, but they’ll stay. Not that the girls were inadequate. And then the rest of the song is just MapQuest directions. It’s brilliant in the Hold Steady way that makes all of their classic material brilliant.

On the album’s 2016 deluxe edition, “Girls Like Status” follows as track twelve, another song I’ve only gotten to hear at the Boys and Girls shows, in addition to the Mountain Goats & Dillinger Four show. A few other B-sides come in tow, with my favorite being “Arms & Hearts,” which is compositionally a very strange song, but once it gets going with the refrain, it pays off like any Hold Steady classic with a good old-fashioned pub-rock rouse. “Arms and hearts and alcohol and death. She was awkward and thoughtful and ascending into heaven dripping wet. Arms and hearts and alcohol and faith. We pull each other in, and then we push it all away.”

Boys and Girls in America is a part of me like I know it is for so many other fans, but I never directly saw myself in the boys or girls in Finn’s stories. There are elements of their feelings that I can connect with, like the running themes of frustration and romanticism, or frustration due to romanticism, but ultimately The Hold Steady evokes the same response in me that I know it does for pop-punk and hardcore fans. The finger-pointing, the lyric chanting, the communal exercises in rock and roll: Finn as the Midwest’s greatest preacher, and his band as the barfly gospel choir. There is so much joy in what they do up there. We are all The Hold Steady. 

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Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.

Greg Freeman – All Set The Bone Review

Transgressive Records

Barely a year after Greg Freeman stormed onto the scene with Burnover, the ascendant indie bard of New England is striking while the iron is hot with his ambitious new album All Set The Bone. After the warm reception of Burnover and an energetic, buzzy tour, he set out on a solo journey through the Southwest to write his third album. Freeman spent months walking in the desert, playing guitar, and dealing with an “inhuman” confluence of life events - a combination that quickly bore creative fruit. All Set The Bone teems with the same urgency that defines his first two albums, taking Freeman’s heart-on-sleeve, dynamic Americana to raucous new heights and punishingly bleak lows. Though it feels cut from the same cloth as the rest of his catalog up to this point, Greg is testing the boundaries of the band’s sound as the turbulence of his life is channeled into something shaggier and rawer.

While he carried some of Burnover’s key elements into this new era, such as the plinky piano and emotive horns, the production on All Set The Bone (courtesy of John Congleton) feels much closer to Freeman’s first record I Looked Out. His latest effort shirks the polished tightness of Burnover’s writing and production in favor of a first-idea-best-idea approach that Freeman wields to great effect, churning out excellent songs like the lead single “Indu” in 20 minutes while sick and alone in the desert. Despite the looser approach to genre experiments and sharp changes in energy and song structure, this is a rock record through and through. Each track adds a new flair to the sprawling 67-minute album, but there’s less emphasis on maintaining a sonic throughline as Freeman attempts to capture the chaotic reality of modern life.

If labeling Freeman’s music as “alt-country” already felt reductive, this third record complicates that identity even further with a collection of 13 meaty tracks that span a wide spectrum of rock music. Opener “Cahokia” is a textbook Greg rocker that seamlessly blends the nerve-fried and the euphoric, with a chorus that begs to be sung and lyrical imagery that reflects Freeman’s view of our downtrodden, isolated world. From there, we roll into “Totaled,” which is the rowdiest thrasher of a track that Freeman has ever put to record, capturing the signature noisiness of his live show. The staccato stabs of “Culture” and the spare wailing of “Withdrawn” add to the rawness of the record’s first half and establish a track-to-track dynamism that borders on whiplash.

By the middle of the album, you’ve already heard several different versions of what this band can sound like, and that variety continues on the centerpiece and crown jewel of the album, “Loser’s Prize.” It’s a song that contains all Greg’s multitudes, as it almost breezily flips between the hooky anthem, the western-ish jam, and the noise rock blowout. More than any other track, it captures the band’s rowdy live energy and emphasizes the breadth of its arrangement with well-placed sprinkles of keys, strings, and backup vocals. Despite its presentation as a solo project, All Set The Bone is anything but. Almost a dozen players are credited on the album, ranging from the expected drums, bass, and guitar to keys, sax, trombone, trumpet, accordion, and violin. “Next to Nothing” is another testament to the band’s versatility, as they oscillate between a piano rock groove sesh and a noisy, freak folk instrumental. The lyrics are equally mercurial, rolling from a classic emo declaration, “I don’t wanna be here right now,” directly into a growling punk nightmare:

They’ll stick you in the dog food factory
With a mouth full of teeth like piano keys
Working for a man you will never ever see

It’s a thrilling twister of a song that sets up the album's phenomenal final stretch, with a bit of Neil Young worship in “Costs” and the crooning banjo ballad “Bury Me The Shovel” making what might be my favorite 3-track sequence of the album.

I’m still struggling to quite put my finger on what All Set The Bone actually is, and that isn’t a bad thing. While I hear bits of the 90s in the production style (Pavement, Pixies, Time Out of Mind Dylan), there are singular qualities that make Freeman’s music stand out - the barroom band vibe, his signature high vocal register, and clever lyricism that is at once earnest and wry. Even if all 13 tracks don’t converge on a particular sound or theme, Greg is refining a sonic identity that is increasing in scope by continuing to delight and devastate in new ways. All Set the Bone is the sound of him and the band experimenting a bit, working out a few exciting new ideas without too much concern for perfection. This sort of looseness, paired with this level of quality, seems to reflect a promising state of creative freedom for the project. After spending some quality time with the album, that liberty to experiment starts to feel like an antidote, a coping mechanism, and, undeniably, a relief from the hectic reality it reflects.

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Parker White lives and works in Boulder, CO where he moonlights as a music writer. When not attending local shows or digging for new tunes, he’s hosting movie nights, hitting the trail, or hanging out with his beloved cat, Reba McEntire. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram @parkerdoubleyoo, and you can read other stuff he’s written over on his Substack.

more eaze – valley and structure | Album Review

Thrill Jockey

In my dreams, I inhabit a world that has become reassuringly familiar over my thirty-odd years of sleep. I often return to the same three landscapes. One is a large room, wood-paneled and crowded, where I often encounter friends, or at least memories of them. The next is a vast mountain landscape, stretching beyond the tree line, sickeningly sheer cliffs dropping into millions of acres of granite. The last is my favorite: a deeply verdant and misty hill region, threaded by a road that never leads me to my destination, no matter how long I sleep. There is strange comfort in these landscapes - relief in the repetition of whatever pattern my unconscious brain is tracing. I feel similarly about music, finding myself consistently drawn to minimalist works. The thrum of the music’s predictability brings me comfort, cocooning my ears with a beautiful structure of rhythms, patterns, and notes. 

Because of this, I expected that valley and structure, the latest release from composer Mari Rubio, would immediately capture my minimalism-loving ears. Mari releases music under the name more eaze, both solo and with a rotating group of musicians behind her. I’ve greatly enjoyed her body of work over the years, watching with admiration as the worlds she spins with each new release build upon themselves in delicate, haunting webs. When I reviewed one of more eaze’s recent albums, sentence structure in the country, I commented on the otherworldly aspect of the music - it felt surreal, even dystopian, merging nature with machines. This effect is certainly also present on valley and structure, but in a distinctly different way. Instead of a darkly alien dystopian atmosphere, I sense vast open spaces, eternal fields of waving golden grass, and mirages that taunt from an indistinct horizon. A cloudless sky screams silently above, empty and infinite and possibly too blue. It’s a different brand of dystopia: everything is so perfect, so clean, so empty, that it cannot be anything but unsettling. The tie between these two albums is clear, not only in name but also in theme: whispers and fragments of sentence structure float through valley and structure like leaves in a breeze. It’s a brilliant concept, further tying more eaze’s worldbuilding into itself in a deeply satisfying way.

The album opens with a track titled “they tried to shove me in the structure,” featuring a deftly plucked guitar line that loops and drives forward incessantly. It’s accompanied by warm string swells that alternate between joy and unease, captured in a continuous dance. As I wander the golden grasses of this album’s landscape, I see the first sign of life in the terrible blue sky above: a hawk and a sparrow whirling in dizzying spirals, fighting over territory. The sparrow is relentless, but the hawk evades her, and their struggle traces a Möbius strip in the sky. A thin layer of strings hum in my ears as I watch them, and I notice the guitar’s arpeggios have started to lead away from the home key. However, the tension eases slightly as the rhythmic playing returns to the familiar notes of the opening chord progression. The hawk, realizing it will not be able to outsmart the persistent sparrow, breaks the loop and disappears into the endless azure ceiling. The sparrow has avoided the structure. Radio feedback crackles in my ears, and I realize I am not alone. 

I look around me and catch a glimpse of something metallic on the wavering horizon. The next track, “what’s wrong with the structure?” begins to play: a solo violin enters, bowing a precise string of notes that resemble a technical exercise. Its eerie quality is heightened as another violin joins, harmonizing in various intervals, and the music begins to melt together as a wind instrument adds to the arrangement. There is a faint clatter of voices and static layered behind the instruments, the piece whirring from one ear to the other until, at last, the guitar joins in. Dreamy whole-tone progressions create a blurry atmosphere - I notice a piano fading in and out, the deep thud of a bass, and even the shimmer of a distant synth organ. The silvery chords match the glint of the structure on the horizon I am walking toward. It flickers like a mirage, but the closer I get, the clearer it comes into focus. 

As I mentioned earlier, I am deeply drawn to minimalism for its sense of familiarity and the comfort I find in repetition. This same hypnotic quality is present throughout valley and structure, especially on track three: “once you say yes to the structure, you never get out.” An intensely rhythmic violin melody opens the track, paired in unison with guitar and bass. As I trudge towards the monolithic silver building on the horizon, I am reminded of an album that drives in a similar way. “Different Trains,” I muse silently. It’s one of minimalist composer Steve Reich’s best works. A moving, captivating, and powerful piece of art, I love its texture and depth. I find more eaze employing her own gifts of textural writing here, the instruments whirling around each other, mirroring their melodies in a method so contrapuntal that it feels damn near Baroque. The building is closer than ever, yet I have never walked so far. Everything comes around to itself in the end - modern music sounds Baroque, and the hawk is conquered by the sparrow.

I notice that the music has not stopped playing. Pleased, for I don’t want the song to end, I note that it’s exactly 20 minutes and two seconds long. 20:02 - a delightful numerical palindrome. Another Möbius strip of sorts. Around the eight-minute mark, “once you say yes to the structure, you never get out” slows, skulking back into the only shadow on this planet: the one cast by the building, its darkness a gash across endless miles of golden wheat. There is no whirling melody now, just sustained strings and the occasional comment from the piano. A low, dull humming fills the air as I find myself at the base of the building. There are no windows and no doors. It is hot even in the shade, hotter than it was under the eternal blue void. So I wait as brass and guitar offer their nervous harmonies. I hear a soft voice humming beneath the strings, though I’ve not noticed any company. The air grows heavier as the seconds pass, and the music plods now, no longer hiding in the shadows, but pulling itself along under the blazing sun. I notice the hawk has returned to the sky, whirling in spirals that draw closer to the ground with each rotation. The music has become frantic, and I find my heart beating in my hand, staining my palm red. On the horizon, the grasses dance with anticipation, and the violins follow in a fierce ostinato. I am weeping without knowing it. My heart is no longer a heart; before my eyes, it becomes the sparrow. And then the building opens with a scream – 

– and swallows me. “i’m in the structure.”

This is my favorite song. A heartwrenching melody, sung by an invisible entity, echoes in my ears as I am borne up, up, up to the top of the building. Major one to minor six chords, I note. It’s the same progression as my favorite song of all time, “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen. I am still weeping, tears coursing silently down my face. I do not know why. The violin wounds me, so beautiful that I ache with every note. The sound of waves crashing surround me, filling my ears with pressure as though I were underwater, but I am dry and surrounded by light. I am at the top of the building now, and I still hear the voice singing to me: "I’m content to be the void that collapses time and space / tracing out the melodies, replacing / tones / the faceless friend somehow never alone / blanketed by tastes.” I know these lyrics, for they are the same ones used on “The Producer,” a track from sentence structure in the country. Hearing them on this album, in an ethereal new setting, is like greeting an old friend. I am in the structure, and have only just entered the structure, but maybe I have always been here.

Time bends, and cold air burns my lungs without warning. I am on top of the monolithic building now, and there is no visible way to leave. “how can we get out of the structure” is the final track on valley and structure, and the only means of escape for the listener, and for me. The plucked, near-percussive rhythm at the beginning mirrors my heartbeat as I contemplate my options for escape. I sense that I am not alone: I turn slowly and behold something more than light but less than solid. I am briefly reminded of the Eldil of Perelandra. So this has been the source of the singing, the melodies, the driving life of this strange planet. As the music begins to deepen and build, the ever-present piano weaves through the top and then the bottom of the melody like a bright blue thread. Harmonies begin to melt into dissonance, and as the chill of the thin air cuts through my clothes, I hear the more-than-light being start to sing. The music is disintegrating slowly, beautifully, but the driving rhythm never falters. The light atop the structure is all-consuming, growing with each breath, and a honey-sweet breeze carries the sound of victory. I too am light, more than light, and I watch the structure sink into the golden grasses. Suspended in air, I spiral higher with the hawk and the sparrow. The entire planet vibrates with joyous melody, and I – I am singing too.

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Britta Joseph is a musician and artist who, when she isn’t listening to records or deep-diving emo archives on the internet, enjoys writing poetry, reading existential literature, and a good iced matcha. You can find her on Instagram @brittajoes.

wakelee – Under Construction Forever | Album Review

Wax Bodega

I never have the right words to say. Being a writer comes with the expectation that I should know what to say and that I should have the right words, but for the people who matter most, I seldom do. In his 1982 novella, The Body, Stephen King wrote, “The most important things are the hardest things to say.” This sentiment has stuck with me like gum on the bottom of a shoe, largely because I related so closely to the protagonist, Gordie Lachance, an offbeat kid with an affinity for writing and familial trauma to boot. In the wake of his older brother’s unexpected death, Lachance and his group of misfit buddies set off to find a dead body in the woods, seeking small-town acceptance for locating a missing boy. Throughout the coming-of-age tale, our narrator struggles to put his feelings of isolation, grief, and parental neglect into words. 

As an adolescent, this is largely expected; however, no one prepares you to carry that loss of words into adulthood. Frustratingly, it almost gets harder to say what’s on your mind as feelings, relationships, and life become increasingly complex. Even when it comes to things we feel strongly about, often once we try to put them into words, they fall flat. On their new LP, Under Construction Forever, the Brooklyn-based indie unit wakelee grapple with this perpetual struggle to find the right words in the most difficult circumstances.

wakelee are a group that lean into the nostalgic idiosyncrasies of life. This is evident even in their band name, which comes from a park in New Jersey where twin brothers Alex and David Bulmer grew up playing baseball. Although they eventually became high school benchwarmers, the yearning remained, and they decided to channel their energy into music. After playing in a handful of different bands throughout high school and college, Alex and David enlisted Elliot Shiang on bass after a chance meeting at a party in New York. What emerged was wakelee, a project with an eclectic mix of influences that ebb and flow seamlessly, proving the trio to be anything but a run-of-the-mill emo unit.

Photo by Gabe Drechsler

The group’s 2023 self-titled album features tracks like “Mood Rings” and “Texas” that draw on Pingrove and Macseal, while 2025’s Doghouse EP keeps those same emo foundations but also pulls in influences ranging from The Story So Far to Tyga and Korn. The group flexes this wide range of inspiration throughout that EP, crafting emo/pop-punk bangers like “mildlyinteresting” before switching to the alt-rock vibes of “Gary's Outcome” just a few songs later. Doghouse catapulted the trio from another passing NYC band to one that not only commands but deserves attention.

Under Construction Forever is wakelee’s first release with a label, the band now backed by the eternally tapped-in Wax Bodega. On their sophomore LP, the trio embrace their assorted tastes, resulting in one of the most exciting emo-adjacent releases in quite some time. Brisk album opener “Sundial” clocks in at just under two minutes and finds Bulmer grounding the listener in his reality, “Shaking / all my thoughts turning physical.” The introductory track finds the group dipping into some of their most aggressive material thus far, with the above lyrics screaming in on a red carpet of cymbal crashes and guttural bass lines. The song tackles the difficulties of owning up to your shortcomings at the end of a tenuous relationship as Bulmer sings, “In a different timeline / I’d have it all laid out / I know it’s my fault / I’ve been hanging on to you for so long."

The lead single, “Joyce Kilmer Service Area,” named after a rest stop about halfway between New York and Philly, is a polished pop-punk heater where the co-production from Zach Aumueller and Chris Freeman (Hot Mulligan) shines through. Debuting the first d-beat in a wakelee cut, it’s a song packed with family gripes and fast-tempoed instruments that mirror the lyrics’ palpable frustration. The song depicts a snafu where Bulmer’s unidentified relative seemingly forgot to meet him at the aforementioned service area, and he rebuts: “You’re forever slipping in an absent-minded mode / So I’ll stay home now / There’s little left between us / And I guarantee that you know it hurts me so bad.” Under Construction Forever forwardly mulls over blood-related barriers that tend to harbor lifetimes of pent-up resentments when left untended. 

Being plagued with familial dissonance is an overarching theme in The Body as well, which, if you haven't figured it out yet, also served as the inspiration for the 1986 film Stand by Me. Yes, the same film that features one Davie “Lard Ass” Hogan, who transforms a pie-eating contest into a puke-induced revenge fest. Despite the occasional absurdity of King’s writing, he eclipses it with truth-laden prose that sticks with readers for an eternity. Lachance feels largely invisible to his parents, who are in the depths of grief following the loss of their first-born. Much like the iconic story-turned-film, Under Construction Forever seems, at least in part, to be a cautionary tale about unresolved grief. On the mid-album cut “Box Fan,” Bulmer compares ever-present grief to the constant hum of a box fan, one that never goes away but simply becomes less noticeable over time. “Well, I know this went south / But I can drive there / A subtle distance / That’s always kept us apart,” he musters after the screeching tremolo of the bridge. 

Both “Decision Tree” and “Box Fan” put forth this concept of intentionally placed distance, both physical and hypothetical, that is woven throughout the LP. It’s here where Bulmer recognizes: “I tried to measure all the distance / There were signs I just missed them / Every thought is a misstep.” wakelee’s use of metaphorical gaps between loved ones aligns with the overall theme of an awkward barrier where words fail to adequately penetrate. “Decision Tree” traverses complicated feelings in relationships (familial and romantic alike) in which words could never define the brooding resentment, guilt, and longing that fester. Musically and lyrically, the track finds the band at the top of their game with pensive instrumentation and devastatingly catchy vocals that will bring tears to the eyes of even the most stoic of individuals: “There’s so much left to say, but I can’t get it out.” 

Summoning Worst Part Ever-esque vibes, “See It Now” immediately follows and finds wakelee licking their wounds while attempting to articulate complex feelings. With stripped-down lyrics and instrumentation, this song captures what happens when reality crushes romanticism, as the guilt-fueled song sheds lyrics like, “Should’ve had your back when I swore that I’d be there / I still wear your Crocs around the apartment.” In a vexed attempt to put complicated emotions into words, it confirms that oftentimes our expectations of how things should sound, or how situations should play out, are rarely as embellished as we imagine.

The album’s second single, “Statue,” certainly embodies emo elements, but leans more into alternative rock influences while the lyrics bring the family discourse to a head. Detailing trivial arguments with a forgetful relative, like forgotten passwords and inherited lower back pains, Bulmer sings, “One day we’ll gather to spread your ashes all over the ground / And it’ll be hard not to think about where things went wrong.” A few tracks later, the numbing feeling strung throughout the Aphex Twin-inspired “080808” further captures the convoluted mess of feelings that come with the loss of a loved one.

Under Construction Forever's closing tracks, "Open Ended" and "Glitterbox," tie the album up quaintly, as the band recognize their flaws whilst showing themselves some grace. Bulmer compares his destructive rumination to an oversteeped bag of tea, wonders why water is his number one enemy, and acknowledges that he’s “under construction forever,” before repeating “get used to it.” wakelee wrestles with the troubling realization that we rarely live up to who we expect ourselves to be, our loved ones are often not who we need them to be, and life tends to violently veer off the roads we desperately want to stay on. 

In an interview with SPIN, the band says of the album, “There’s the angle of anger, and ‘you shouldn’t have done this,’ and then there’s the angle of ‘I wish I said more. I wish I listened to you more,’ or realizing that you aren’t that great of a person.” Life is chock-full of what-ifs and should-ofs that we absolutely will dwell on if allowed to. Stephen King's assertion that “The most important things are the hardest things to say” also doubles as a recognition of things left unsaid. As acknowledged throughout this album, there's so much that wakelee (and I) would say if only we could find the right words. 

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Brandon Cortez is a coffee, football, and music nerd from Texas. He’s on Twitter @numetalrev.

Able Baker – Able Baker | Album Review

Self-Released

Don’t you like it when rock music just fucking rocks? I love it when rock music just fucking rocks. That was the only thought in my head while watching Able Baker at Union Pool back in April. The entire time frontman Tim Anderson and his band played, I had the biggest smile on my face and turned to my friend multiple times to mouth “wow.” From the moment they opened with “All The Bars” into the absolutely massive tune “Steeper Stairs,” Able Baker held me in thrall with their perfect hooks and ecstatic guitar solos. 

I was at that show to see Sunshy, whose dreamy LP, I don’t care what comes next, has become one of my main comfort records. Sunshy indeed transported me with their swirls of guitar, but when I left, I was desperate to hear those Able Baker songs again. Now that Able Baker has finally dropped their self-titled LP, I can re-experience those highs and have come to realize how much more there is to the band than just pure ecstasy.  

Tim Anderson has been toiling away crafting songs as Able Baker since 2016’s “Play One on TV.” Anderson hadn’t yet developed the Elliott Smith-esque voice that defines how he sings now—gentle yet disarmingly candid—but you can hear the bones of what makes this batch of songs so exciting. 2021’s Spiral Bound Songs and subsequent singles saw him refine his craft with a close group of collaborators, namely producers Isaac deBroux-Slone and Logan Severson. Together, those two draw out the intimate details in Anderson’s songwriting while making the performances sound absolutely massive. And those performances, delivered by Sunshy members Gwen Giedeman, Jordan Zamansky, and Eric Breden, as well as notable contributions by guitarist Graham Hunt and cellist Chaepter Negro, are perfectly attuned to the songs they serve: loose, limber, and full of summery joy on the ragers, paranoid and ragged on the tracks that seethe.

Of the tracks Able Baker played back at Union Pool, the one that caught its hooks deepest into the folds of my brain was “In Your Town.” Why that one? Because it is a perfect piece of Weezer-y pop rock, the kind that hits you in the chest and reminds you, oh yeah, I have to breathe. The verses ride a bobbing guitar melody that briefly quiets as Anderson sings “something’s always the matter in your town” before the chorus hits you in the gut. As the band crescendos behind Anderson belting out the title, I dare you not to feel alive. 

Anderson is a master of crafting these exhilarating, Photo Album-era Death Cab for Cutie-like dynamics. He’s always subtly tweaking moments to achieve maximum impact. Where the first pre-chorus of “In Your Town” has the band building to Anderson’s repeated assertion, the second attempt gets only one run-through, and a guitar rips into the mix before he can even get out the word “town.” It doesn’t even sound like he gets more than the letter T out. He may, but you won’t hear it in the mix. It is a perfect moment of the music fully embodying the mood of the track. The guitar picks up where words fall short. 

“In Your Town” isn’t the only moment on Able Baker where the band pulls off these moments of perfect rock songcraft. Put the record on shuffle, and whichever song plays will be full of examples. “The Word” rushes through the verses to get to the choruses because what matters is the bridge into the final, wordless chorus. The band stretches out on the bridge, throwing in enough drum fills to last a lesser band's entire discography as the bass line locks into this sublime rhythm that makes me smile every time I hear it. Then when the chorus comes back, it’s somehow even bigger than before. “Secret Admirer” pulls the opposite trick. Anderson is a paranoid mess the whole song, singing “I would die if the secret got out.” The band rockets out of the second chorus with an epic guitar solo and pounding drums accentuating the thrill of being exposed, a section that must be building to something, but then it all collapses; there is no grand conclusion here. It is a moment of hope that gets crushed down. When the main riff comes back right at the end, quieter than it started the song, it is a moment of pure devastation. 

I didn’t get that devastation back in April. Only by running these tracks back have I reveled in how provocative they are. I wasn’t wrong in my initial assessment that “Steeper Stairs” is a massive tune, but now I’m lost in the yearning to reach through the mirror of memory alongside Anderson. It’s as if the recursive dialogue and images of Last Year at Marienbad were boiled into a rock song. 

I would like to retract my prior suggestion to shuffle the record, because Able Baker aren’t just good at structuring song dynamics. Able Baker is a perfectly sequenced record. They slot these softer, gentler songs like the acoustic filmic “Noir” and the hazy “Picture Pose” into the running order to give their distorted pop epics space to breathe. That’s not to say these songs only exist to break up the running order. “Picture Pose” rides a beautiful, dreamy vibe to transcendence as Anderson sings “you’re done with self love / it’s time to self destruct” while “Noir” references the titular film genre over a folky stunner.  

One of the great things about really good rock music is that no matter how hard I try to put into words what Able Baker makes me feel, I’ll never get across what exactly it is like to listen. So if you like really good rock music, the kind that really just fucking rocks, I can’t tell you to go listen to Able Baker enough. Please, go hear what it feels like. 

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Lillian Weber is a fake librarian in NYC. She writes about gender, music, and other inane thoughts on her Substack, all my selves aligned. You can follow her on Insta @Lilllianmweber.