Combat – Stay Golden | Album Review
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Counter Intuitive Records
Somewhere in the back of Ottobar, I was sipping a drink with Deep Eddy's grapefruit vodka as I turned to answer my friend's question. He had tagged along with me to see Prince Daddy & the Hyena's summer tour and was asking about the local opener. The star-studded lineup included saturdays at your place, Riley!, and Carpool, but my friend was most curious about the first band on the list – Combat. I think I yelled something along the lines of “best band in Baltimore right now,” or “you wouldn’t believe their new single,” or “they’re probably going to bring the building down,” but was cut off because, at that moment, Combat crashed onto the stage. The air in the room that hung with pre-show humidity suddenly buzzed with electricity as we braced for what was coming. Within seconds of the first chord, the whole crowd was moving.
I was really bad at physics in school, so don't quiz me on anything else, but I remember that the law of conservation of energy says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can change form. I’m pretty sure that Combat’s sophomore album, Stay Golden, is sonic proof of that. Throughout the concept record, Combat bounces between speed and resonating impact, often at the turn of a lyric. Ultimately, the live wire sound keeps the momentum of the album at a thrashing high energy while the lyrics delve into insecurities, secrets, memories, and an ever-evolving outlook on the very album you’re listening to. Through meta self-analysis and music so emotive it feels impossible to capture, Combat’s latest is a legend in the making.
After a brief piano intro, a sample from Spider-Man: Homecoming sets the tone, playing off the band’s name as a robotic Jennifer Connelly asks, “Would you like me to engage Enhanced Combat Mode?” to which an emphatic Peter Parker responds, “Enhanced Combat Mode? Yeah!” Seconds later, the band rips into the jingly cacophony of the titular “Stay Golden." which tears out in a thrash of whirlwind pop-punk. Before we get any further, I feel the need to explain the physical impact of this song. When I saw Combat in July, this song, the album’s first single, had only been out for a couple of weeks. It was received with rave reviews, appearances in 5x5 Friday grids, and apt comparisons to the wild and raucous sound of Bomb the Music Industry! But then I saw it live, and as much as I’ve tried to rework this sentence, it is impossible to describe the ferocity the band threw into this song and how much the crowd threw right back. I mean, the whole pit knew the words within a handful of days and was scrambling over each other to scream “Hey Holden!” back to the lyric’s namesake, frontman Holden Wolf. That split second pretty much explained the frenzy that Ottobar had turned into. Luckily, it’s immortalized on video here (and yes! That is the album's producer, Origami Angel's Ryland Heagy filling in on guitar, and yes! That is a Riley! cameo).
The whole album is a sprint from there. After being drop-kicked by the title track, “Faith” feels like being punted through the air, continuing the more meta side of the album as Wolf describes writing the song you’re listening to. “Put Me In, Coach” feels like falling but never hitting the ground and keeps up the impossible breakneck speed of the album’s introductory tracks. While a brick is on the gas pedal, the jaded side of the album’s lyrical themes are put into overdrive as Wolf sardonically asks, “Do I make you lots of money?”
This stretch of songs feels like someone who doesn’t know they have telekinesis on the brink of discovering their powers by accidentally exploding their room. It’s building and building and building. This cartoon tornado of energy spirals into the aptly titled “Full Speed Ahead,” a song that climbs like you’re on a broken elevator with a cord pulling you up and then dropping you in a way that makes everything that came before it somehow feel slower by comparison. Wolf yells with such a strain in his voice that it feels like the band is using everything they have left, and it’s only the fifth song.
After furious cymbal crashes and guitars that ricochet against each other, the front half of the album crescendos into the first 8-minute powerhouse, “Weird Ending Explained Pt. 1.” It’s chaotic. It’s a breather. It’s chilling. It’s miserable. It’s apologetic. It’s bitten. It bites back. The song is self-confident and self-referential, feeling like this album’s answer to 2022’s Text Me When You Get Back. “Weird Ending Pt. 1” gives the listener an abridged history of Combat thus far, closing a chapter mid-album while also showing the band’s cards and revealing the direction they’re taking now. The song weaves and winds, pulling together past musical motifs and forgotten chords from their catalog while the lyrics pile on top of each other, working into a building panic. The momentum picks back up when suddenly Wolf flips and describes the unending process of writing another album, jokes about using leitmotifs, and bemoans trying to stay golden despite it all. Honestly, it makes me feel silly to write that they used something like leitmotifs and recurring lyrics — as if I walked directly into a trap. It’s yet another crack in the fourth wall of the album, a jab at what the song just did. As it slows and fades out, Combat is left standing in a kind of panopticon of their own making as they decide between expectations for the band, their future, and the audience.
From there, the album pumps the brakes, but only slightly. The blistering momentum cools down into longer songs and slower deliveries, but that doesn’t mean the raging is over. Guitars duke it out on the Prince Daddy-ish “Happy Again” and “Compound Sentences” feels like the fast-food-obsessed spiritual successor to Origami Angel’s "24 Hr Drive-Thru," but with a bit of twang thrown into the mix. Between those two songs, “Merrow Lanes” builds traction back up, using Magic the Gathering as a flexible metaphor for poking and prodding at something until it reaches perfection. To exemplify this, Wolf declares he’s “on the way to idealized far destinations” but “stuck on a freight train to Loserville.” The whole song ultimately turns against the notion of vapidly improving yourself as it repeats the cloying phrasing “you’re gonna have to do better,” mocking those who deal such flat advice while the music turns into a stampede that is sure to take the floor out of any venue they play this in.
The energy of the final tracks oscillates between kinetic and potential. “Epic Season Finale” is a sort of pseudo-closer, pulling the self-depreciation, want, and meta sides of the album's lyrics to more forgiving heights. It soars up and sits in the same blue sky as the cover. It’s a buddy comedy of a song. Amongst the concept album framework, it has almost a final scene quality, an epic season finale if you will, one with forgotten conflict, accepted confessions, big smiles, and forever friendships.
The promised second part of “Weird Ending Explained Pt. 1” arrives to close out the album. Of the nine minutes that make up “Weird Ending Explained Pt. 2,” the first two are purely instrumental, a sturdy bass line holding it all together until the crash. If “Epic Season Finale” was the final scene, this would be the montage that plays over the credits. Much like its mid-album twin, “Weird Ending Explained Pt. 2” revisits prior melodies and themes but focuses on Stay Golden instead of prior Combat projects, all while staring directly through the hole in the 4th wall. With these meta devices in place, this song also continues to offer new perspectives on the album you're listening to as you're listening to it. One of the most jarring comes when Wolf amends "Faith," circling back to the complications of writing this particular album:
It's just getting harder
To try to get it through your skull
Sounding out your vowels and consonants
Barely make out compound sentences
George never played the upright bass
Was just a line to fill out space
With impersonal, infactual, and total witty quips.
These lyrics turn the entire album on its head, a simple glimpse at how many details and references are packed into its 40-minute runtime. The album begs to be replayed immediately, and it’s not even over yet. The quick admittance leads into the final few minutes of the song as it jumps from a fast-stepping melody into a wrenching wail, into a trumpet-laced dirge, into a last-ditch bouncy refrain, and into slowing violins that loop into the first track.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but on Stay Golden, it’s entirely infinite, and this is clearly only the beginning. Back at Ottobar in July, Combat’s set ended in the same frenzy it started, with constant collisions spiraling around the room and out into the crowd. But all kinetic energy eventually has to shift back into potential; the next band must go on, we need to find the owner of whoever lost a shoe in the pit, and I need to grab a beer before the next set.
Caro Alt’s (she/her) favorite thing in the world is probably collecting CDs. Caro is from New Orleans, Louisiana and spends her time not sorting her CD collection even though she really, really needs to.
