Apes of the State – What’s Another Night? | Album Review
/Self-released
When I first heard “Punk Rock Shows in Heaven,” I had to search for Laura online. She had been one of my best friends in high school, and I long had thought she was also trans, so it was no surprise when she came out within a month of us seeing Against Me! at the end of sophomore year. She always said school wasn’t for her, so it also wasn’t a surprise when she dropped out of high school the following year. I didn’t want to lose touch with her, but that’s just the way shit goes when you’re worried about taking the ACT and qualifying for nationals in debate while your friend is in the work force and getting her GED. Life has its way of tearing friends apart when you’re just thinking of yourself. It was a surprise, though, when I heard that she started doing heroin at some point in senior year.
The last time I saw her was in December 2019 at our friend Henry’s wake, only four years after we had graduated. Henry had seizures all the time, and they are what inevitably took him. Laura was good, she was clean, she cried on my shoulder before she had to leave for work. No one I’ve kept in touch with since high school mentioned her in the intervening years, and I hate to admit that I never asked because I was worried the answer would be that she died.
I wasn’t expecting to think of Laura when I was listening to Apes of the State’s third album, What’s Another Night?, but I had to know after I heard April Hartman’s voice twist like a dagger while singing about her friend’s Bad Brains t-shirt she wears to remember them. All I could think about were Laura’s Misfits and Fear tattoos.
Apes of the State have always made music about what it means to survive, from the plea to love someone through the pits of desperation on “Strangers” to the nine minutes Hartman dedicates to the internal conflict that accompanies justifying your existence on “Dear Mom.” Now on What’s Another Night?, Apes of the State is concerned about honoring their friends, those who’ve made it this far, and especially those who haven’t.
Throughout What’s Another Night?, Hartman draws on the dissonance of missing the “good old days” and knowing you can never go back there. The folk-pop-punk of “I’m Okay!” and both parts of “Hot Summer Night” draw me back to a memory of the night before junior year when all my friends were at Henry’s house, when we snuck out at 1 a.m. and wandered his neighborhood until we saw a loose street sign pole leaning on the concrete divider ahead of a roundabout when I accidentally pulled it out of the ground when I was just testing to see how stable it was when we all looked at each other before running back to Henry’s house with our shirts off because we had slung them around the pole so we could carry it by the ends of our shirts instead of covering it with our fingerprints when we got to Henry’s house he grabbed his tools and we took the “keep right of divider” sign off when ran the pole back to the roundabout and laid it next to it’s hole in the ground when the next morning while Laura was driving me home we went towards the roundabout and saw a guy from the fire department parked next to the stripped sign writing on a notepad and I just knew when he looked at us he could tell we did it, and when I’m finished reminiscing about that night, I’m reminded of the photo of Henry in a t-shirt with a skateboarding cat propped next to his casket. Things are easier when you’re teenage punks, when your biggest worry is asking your mom for money to get Chipotle while you’re skating 12 miles to the nearest mall. Things are easier before time has definite boundaries and you feel invincible.
But that’s where the hymns of remembrance that make up this record find their strength, in the fact that “time keeps moving forwards even though there is no way of knowing what direction I am facing.” What else is there to do but to keep going, to hope and work towards a better future?
What’s Another Night? isn’t just a set of songs remembering departed friends – it is those moments that Hartman directs to the people still with us that are my favorite on the record. I love the moment on “Little Things” when she so sincerely sings, “and to my friends who are here with me / I’m not saying let’s take life seriously / but I’m serious about you staying alive.” Truthfully, the scariest thing to me about being trans is the reality that all of my trans friends’ lives are made precarious by the disdain we face for existing. There are so many confounding variables in life that I worry I don’t show my love and care for my people enough, like Hartman admits on “Best Friends” or “Round 2” (an acoustic rerecording of the acapella “Fight Song” from Pipe Dream) when she sings, “sorry that I haven’t called you back / I’ve been busy trying not to lose my shit.” I know I am often a shitty fucking friend, I’m the type of girl to put her foot in her mouth with an ill timed joke, but that’s what makes me so grateful my friends still love me. Like Hartman sings, “I promise that I’m working on it.”
I’m worried that it was never clear how much I loved Laura. Right after I came out, I realized Laura didn’t know I was trans too. I’m sure she suspected it, though. Around that time, I found her Instagram account and requested to follow her. That was the first thing I checked when I was listening to “Punk Rock Shows in Heaven,” but three years later, that request is still pending.
When I Googled Laura, I misspelled her last name, but still, there she was. The top result was the page for her wedding in November. There was that close-lipped smile I knew, and a black beanie like always. I saw her holding her fiancée in her arms as Hartman sang “tell the kids that are hooked on heroin / we found a way down here to cope without that.”
I’m happy that even though we weren’t facing the same way, we both moved forward with the time for another night.
Names in this review have been changed for the sake of privacy.
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 burner account on twitter @Lilymweber.