Pictoria Vark – Nothing Sticks | Album Review

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Get Better Records

I keep forgetting my headphones. The snow finally melted here in DC, so I’ve been going on lots of walks, but I keep forgetting my earbuds in my other jacket or purse. I always notice when I’m halfway down the block, and I always decide it’s not worth it to turn back. That means I’ve been going on quiet walks lately. These walks are usually in the evening, at a time when I watch the streetlights turn on while I’m still far from home. I love these walks. The sidewalk is just uneven enough that I can’t look at my phone without risk of tripping, so I don’t. It’s one of the only times of day I feel truly lost in the sounds of my street, neighborhood, and city. I’m aware of every song playing in every bar I pass, what time the birds stop singing, and that one annoying car alarm. I usually spend these walks lost in thought, thinking about last year, the future, and writing this review. Pictoria Vark seems to be on the same walk with me.

Pictoria Vark’s sophomore album, Nothing Sticks, takes Victoria Park’s ongoing, contemplative self-awareness up a notch as she explores both the uplifting and grueling sides of such ruminations. It’s been almost three years since the Chicago-based artist released her acclaimed debut album, The Parts I Dread. Much like her new record, Park’s debut was similarly introspective, weighing her loneliness, her anxieties about the past, and her focus on making music. However, due to the passage of time and her ascendancy as an indie rock darling, Park’s introspection has expanded, widening to look at her life on the other side of that previous worry. Written over Park’s pulsing heartbeat bassline, Nothing Sticks is a pensive indie rock collection that invites listeners to reconcile with, well, how nothing sticks.

The album begins with a dirge as a rolling drumbeat melds with Park’s bass tone through the introduction of “Sara.” It’s a somber melody that turns from concrete to atmospheric and back again over and over, with each clash scaling further and further up. Park’s bass leads the charge as a trumpet overpowers the drum’s steady rhythm. The song falls back, and a guitar croons. It surges again, blanketing her vocals in a balanced cacophony. Park was inspired by environmental sounds and describes this weaving brass encroachment as reminiscent of “a high school marching band in the distance.” 

After establishing the stakes with this introduction, Park rewinds with “No One Left,” a song where shuffling reversed audio is balanced with a guitar digging deeper and deeper as Park sings a repeated admittance, “I think I could love you.” From there, “San Diego” captures her biggest sound yet, thanks to the use of a string section, which has a bright and romantic effect. This elevation leads to “I Sing What I See,” Park’s first song on the album contending with her experiences performing. Much like lights on stage or the roar of a crowd, the song engulfs her.

The song I have been singing the most under my breath is “I Pushed It Down,” which begins with a bare beat before adding a guitar strum for the chorus. A symphony suddenly sparks around the minimalist sound, and a violin becomes a second voice, complementing Park’s as it ducks and dives around her words. The song has a starry quality that winks and waves as Park sings the melancholy refrain, “I pushed it down.”

“Make Me A Sword” sits at the heart of the album. Heart meaning that it’s the center of the project, the most vulnerable, and the place the titular sword is likely aiming towards. In the song, Park confronts both herself and her music career head-on, contending with the relationship she has with her coping mechanisms and her onstage presence. Lyrics paint Park in different roles: a Sisyphean character, a court jester, and even a knight as she grapples with understanding her coping mechanisms and letting them go. Lyrics like “Make me a sword to point against me, I’ll be your shield if it protects me” illustrate this two-fold dynamic over a rhythm that would feel familiar coming out of a basement at a house party. It's a song that dances with multicolor lights and buzzes with warmth.

“Make Me A Sword” fades, and the distorted “Lucky Superstar” begins. This is the album’s loudest track, with a fuzzy and almost haunting feeling as Park repeats “big, blue heart” over an ever-crashing, scratchy crescendo. “Where It Began” follows on an opposite note, delivered with a kind of stripped-down melancholia. It builds like the pressure behind your eyes right before you cry. The album as a whole starts to slow before “We’re Musicians.” In the final track of the album, Park’s bassline bops to a beachy tune, throwing out defeating lyrics like “thank God for good days and bad luck” or “your eyes don’t crease when you smile at me” before drowning the words in total shred.

When describing this album, Park explained, “Everything we want to last, whether it’s a relationship, a moment, a career, or a way of life, will come to an inevitable end.” And like she suggests, this album has to end too, so, with the sound of endlessly crashing waves, it does. 

Nothing Sticks isn’t reassuring, but it’s not dooming either. It's a normal statement that comes from years of consideration and, therefore, is perfect for applying meaning and reflection. The point of this album isn't to get lost in these contemplations but rather to accept the need to let them go. So I am going to keep going on my long walks, and I’ll still be meditative sometimes or whatever, but maybe next time I’ll remember my headphones.

Caro Alt (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and if she could be anyone in The Simpsons, she would be Milhouse.

Weatherday – Hornet Disaster | Album Review

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Topshelf Records

One of my many quirks as a music listener is my obsession with Album Of The Year. For those unfamiliar, it’s essentially Letterboxd for music where users can log and rank whatever they’re listening to. Since its inception, the website has become synonymous with music nerds and Fantano worshippers, as only a fanatic would go out of their way to log something on a site that looks so objectively archaic. I make this sound like it's a bad thing, but the website has helped me discover tons of genres and artists that I never would have known about otherwise, including DIY artist and songwriting extraordinaire Weatherday. 

There’s hardly much known about Swedish songwriter Sputnik, and their music is, by all accounts, considered inaccessible to most popular music listeners. However, I think that answers the question of how they got so popular right there. The production is unpolished to the point where it feels like you hear the buzzing of hornets, the mess of the world around them. In this case, what keeps “unpolished” from turning into “bad” is the heart at the center of each of these songs. Polishing your heart too much can sand off the ability to actually use it and feel it, and boy, does Weatherday use their heart in this record.

It’s been almost six years since Weatherday’s debut full-length, Come In, which brought many of Sputnik’s character creations (including cover art icon Agatha) into a vast musical landscape of blazing guitars and drums. Since then, Weatherday has teamed up with Asian Glow for a split EP in 2022 and embarked on multiple tours throughout the USA with the likes of Michael Cera Palin, Newgrounds Death Rugby, Oolong, and countless other DIY acts. In the course of this process, Sputnik wrote over 70 new tracks and ended up using a mere 19 of them to construct Hornet Disaster, a 76-minute musical odyssey filled to the brim with an expansion of sounds while staying true to the DIY nature of their artistic process.

There was a moment during the creation of the record where Sputnik knew that “The album was going to be about hornets… It just made sense to me.” You can hear those hornets straight from the titular opening track, where it takes three seconds for you to get slammed with high-pitched guitars and fast-moving drums before the track bursts into a guitar solo. “Hornet Disaster” feels like the type of music you would hear over the speakers of a dive bar, but on a more intelligible level. It’s a fantastic way to start the album and far from the only moment where the hornet motif makes an appearance. 

The first leg of this album is quite compact, breezing through the first four songs in less than ten minutes. After the opener, we get more lead-guitar-focused punk sounds with “Meanie,” a track that has Sputnik screaming “HARDER” and “MEANER” as if they have to feel everything before they feel anything. There’s a change into a more delightful Midwest emo type of track with lead single “Angel,” including the hilarious line “like an angel in the shape of an angel,” which has been stuck in my head since I first heard it. The opening few seconds of “Take Care of Yourself (Paper-Like Nests)” offer two firsts on the album: a moment of reprieve from the buzz of cranked-up guitars and a line in Swedish translating to “I’ve always taken care of myself.” It doesn’t last too long, as it immediately blasts back into emo rock sounds and lyrics in English, with the harrowing titular lyric, “When you say things like ‘What the hell’ / what I hear is ‘Take care of yourself.’”

At this point in the tracklist, something I’ve noticed is that all of the subdued moments at the beginning of tracks almost immediately give way to something more explosive, which takes away from some of the potential shock and awe of the instrumentation. However, for “Hug,” a track tackling themes of fulfillment in life and the pain accompanying that lack of fulfillment, it feels more like a gradual build than a complete switch. The musical catalyst is dramatic yet potent, “You thought that you’d feel something by now,” Sputnik repeats, eventually giving way to animalistic screaming, transforming a track that starts as an embrace into a suffocating bear hug.

For all of the pulsing energy within this album, there are quite a few moments of calm, mainly towards the back end of the record. The track “Heartbeats,” which served as the second single, is the most lowkey song on the record to this point and the closest you get to a ballad, with plucky guitars and little claps accentuating the end of the verses. It’s whatever the Weatherday equivalent of a pure love song is. Then there’s “Aldehydes,” which kicks off with spiky guitars and static in the background before transforming into a washed-out section with beautiful strings. That track is a much-needed change of pace from the electricity shooting out from “Nostalgia Drive Avatar” minutes before. 

There are some moments throughout Hornet Disaster that are downright violent, most pertaining to the symbol of blood. Take the aptly named “Blood Online.” At first glance, the song is structurally akin to what you would hear on a typical verse/chorus/verse track, however, during the bridge, the lyrics shift into a nightmarish depiction of Sputnik typing on their phone with blood on their fingers and an overdriven guitar blaring through the speakers. There’s also “Chopland Sedans,” with multiple references to the idea of disaster and even more mentions of blood, along with a depiction of Sputnik cutting their lips with a knife. 

Weatherday weaves together multiple motifs throughout the gargantuan hour and fifteen-minute runtime, which helps everything come together lyrically. Circling back to the title, hornets are found throughout the record in cuts such as “Tiara” and “Blanket.” There’s also the idea of speaking in cursive, which is mainly detailed in “Blanket,” but it also arises in “Chopland Sedans” and “Cooperative Calligraphy.” The motifs end up creating a narrative and structure towards this otherwise sprawling record, condensing some of the core themes into singular words to make the listening experience more unified.

Towards the back end of the record, Weatherday invites listeners into multi-phased journeys that feel less like songs and more like a traditional three-act film script. The track “Nostalgia Drive Avatar” feels like looking back on a slideshow of film photos you took and watching your life flash before your eyes, with lyrics about Sputnik reliving the life that isn’t theirs anymore (“Could it be nostalgia or am I just fond of my memories” really got me good.) There’s also “Agatha’s Goldfish (Sparkling Water),” with an engaging instrumental passage towards the middle of the song and receding vocals that fake out the listener before slamming back in with the chorus.

Other highlights include “Green Tea Seaweed Sea,” one of the more cinematic cuts on the album, which kicks off with a slower acoustic guitar portion and introduces a beautiful flute before once again breaking it all down. The track “Pulka” sees a massive switch in the Weatherday formula, as the track is entirely in Swedish, with lyrics translating to a depiction of a sleigh ride and the joys of Swedish winter. “Pulka” feels integral to Sputnik’s identity, specifically their childhood, considering how passionate this song feels compared to even the other boisterous tracks. There’s also the final track on the album, “Heaven Smile,” which ditches the guitars entirely in favor of an electronic focus that eventually turns into a chaotic reprise of “Ripped Apart By Hands.”

While Hornet Disaster plays to its strengths with emo-centric guitars and lyrics, there are quite a few moments where Sputnik switches up the formula in some way, and most of the time, they succeed in their experimentation. To some, this record may seem like a product of reckless abandon or a collection of swings from a DIY artist. However, upon closer inspection, listeners find calls of a dreamer who finally possesses the words to express their emotions without purely hiding behind fictional characters. It’s hard to deny the growth and ambition within Weatherday’s newest venture, and it’s even more fun when you embrace the world they have created.

Samuel Leon is a writer, photographer, and overall average Brooklynite. They love to cook one pan recipes and photograph performances of all shapes and sizes. Hit them up at @sleonpics on Instagram if you want cool pictures or have any good recipes/music recommendations you would like to share.

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.

Star 99 – Gaman | Album Review

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Lauren Records

I have pretty lofty ambitions for my life, but if you asked how I plan to accomplish them, I wouldn’t have a clue what to tell you. I actually don’t know how to make a plan, to tell the truth. If I don’t have an external stimulus pushing me toward a goal, I’ll stay motionless and stagnant. I’ve sat on a health scare for two years because I think I can make my appointment tomorrow. The fact that I moved across the country has nothing to do with my long-standing desire to live in New York; instead, my life here is owed to my driven girlfriend. The first time I read Conversations With Friends, I put in my Goodreads review how much I identified with the apathetic Francis. When I started rereading it, I hoped I’d prove that read to be foolish, but when I got to the end, I just felt ashamed of how much more like her I was after four years. No, I don’t like that about myself either. 

The lyrics on Gaman, Star 99’s sophomore album, aren’t that self-disparaging, but the sense of longing for love and hope for a better future they evoke is apt for someone in their mid-20s to belt along to while driving through a suburban town they dare to dream of escaping. That’s how I felt driving through my Kansas suburb, screaming along to Sunchokes, a clear Gaman antecedent that I had on repeat after I moved home in the wake of COVID. Lest you think I’m being dramatic, it’s all in the title. Gaman, the term, comes from Zen Buddhism and refers to enduring the worst with dignity. Gaman, the album, encapsulates the feeling of discontent I get from The Worst Person in the World; unbearable dissonance between external expectations and your internal world. This isn’t new ground for the band; after all, their debut, Bitch Unlimited, did have the lyric “but I don’t know how to talk to / people that buy houses.”

The first time I heard the lead single “Kill,” my brain instantly connected the track with the opening sequence of Legally Blonde. Something about the melody or that opening line sparked a connection with the brilliant decision to pair a montage of Elle Woods with Hoku’s perfectly ironic “Perfect Day.” The character of Elle Woods is even fit for a Star 99 song, as she is determined to make her own place within a structure that doesn’t want her. 

The most I ever felt disconnected was during my freshman year of college. I’d decided to go to the community college, a 20-minute suburban drive from my parents’ house, in the midst of struggling with my assigned gender, while all my closest friends went to state schools together and made fun of my fake college experience. The only one who I felt like loved me unconditionally during that time was my dog, Stevie. When I hear “Brother,” I’m filled with that desperation again in the chorus recounting commonly aired ads “for work injury lawsuits / turn cash into gold.” At the time, I was terrified of turning into the “hometown beauty now that everyone’s gone,” as described in “Emails.”

A lot of those friends are back home now with mortgages and spouses. I know that lifestyle would never work for me, but I still feel uncertain when I consider the fact that they spend less a month to own their home than I do renting my closet of an apartment. That’s why my favorite lyric from the album is on the song “Pacemakers,” the simple and efficient cry, “I don’t know how to be happy, I just / know how to make it work.” 

I’ve thought all my life that escaping home would be enough, but making peace with yourself is an everyday struggle that requires hope you’ll do it right and grace to accept you’ll fuck it up sometimes. That acceptance is all over Gaman, most notably in the beautiful chorus on track two: “Every time we go to bat / we perpetuate ourselves / again and again.” It’s a beautiful reminder that we’re all just like “trees trying to be a forest because / that’s all they know,” it’s only natural to feel discontent when we fail to make our forest. 

Gaman isn’t just wallowing though, these songs are fucking fun. “Pushing Daisies” charges forward like the best pushpit starter and then dips into a tension-building bridge as Thomas Calvo repeats “If calling back is too hard,” before launching back into the roiling verse. “Gray Wall” may have some of the most nostalgic lyrics, but the trip-hop drums, harmonica, and acoustic guitar refuse to be mournful of what’s past. 

What makes all the unbearable mental turmoil worth it, when “they won’t build statues of me” and when “my life won’t be biographied,” is those small moments. That love between a girl and her dog. Seeing a pack of cigarettes that makes you remember those quiet moments smoking with someone who’s not around anymore. Biking to a friend’s house without telling anyone where you’re going. Put more simply, “But I love you so much, and I am so lucky.”

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 Instagram and Bluesky @lillianmweber

The Casper Fight Scene – S/T | Album Review

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PNWK Records

One of the hardest parts of being alive is that one day, you sit down, and everything you have ever lived through punches you in the face. Suddenly, you’re forced to reckon with every sin you’ve indulged in, every person that has hurt you, and every mistake that you’ve ever made. In their self-titled debut, Marquette-based emo punks, The Casper Fight Scene face these missteps, losses, and spoiled relationships with a loud, guitar-laden sound across ten tracks. 

The album consistently delivers engaging and intricate guitarwork from Kenny Quick, who utilizes a tone that sounds as though it is spinning in a circle around your head. The band uses this guitar-forward approach to wade listeners into the depths of this release, starting with the one-two punch of “Summer’s End Smoke Out” and “Young Neil, He Lives Here.” This prickly guitar tapping blends well with the rhythm work from bassist Peter Hart and drummer Michael McGaffigan. Over each song, vocalist Jason Swallow switches things up, at times deploying a loud, emotional wail where you almost hear his vocal cords vibrating. Other times, he uses a more toned-down mumble that allows him to do some good old-fashioned singing.

While this album may be a bit of an instrumental showcase, the place it shines the brightest is in Swallow’s lyrics. In songs like “Young Neil, He Lives Here,” he presents the concept of a bad day becoming a bad week and does so through the presentation of his room falling further and further into disrepair. It creates a space that anybody who has struggled with mental health can understand, as hygiene and room care are the first things to go when mental illness rears its head. A similar theme appears in the penultimate track, “Rookie Card,” in which lyrics about doing laundry and then never folding it hit far too close to home for me as someone who has a pile of clothes sitting on my bed right now. We all have the tendency to say that we are okay while ignoring the obvious issues in our lives, such as not eating or never following up on our promises.

There is also a common refrain that appears in the album as both “Interlude” and “Motorcycle” feature the repetition of “What a shame, what a shame, what a goddamn shame” in their closing moments. “Motorcycle” is a powerful track about facing your own self-hatred and realizing that we all fall victim to our own self-destructive behavior if we’re not careful. 

One of the songs that hit me the hardest when listening through was “Callous.” I am someone who has struggled a lot with addiction and self-loathing, and hearing this track brings me to tears every single time I listen to it. I remember sitting on the floor in my parent’s kitchen saying things much like the lyrics, “I wanna be a little cleaner this time next year / I wanna be proud of myself / I don’t wanna be the sum of all my flaws / I wanna be the picture of health” and then putting that off until I no longer could anymore.

Two of the strongest recurring topics throughout the album are making mistakes and self-loathing. The song “Cadillac Death Trap” features imagery of drunk driving and repeated requests from Swallow to “just stay until you’re sober.” The track begins with the lyrics “I don’t want to be an asshole anymore,” which is the perfect start for a song that sounds like a note to yourself to keep moving forward despite what is happening in your life. It also might be a Menzingers reference, but who’s to say? Occasionally you will find yourself in a dark place, and even though you could run now and potentially put yourself or someone else in danger, it is better to stand tall and let yourself sober so the feelings process and pass in a good way.

The song has an immediate transition into “Geezer,” which begins with imagery of crashing a car that lines up well with the drunk driving references in “Cadillac Death Trap,” however, the song brings out another important theme on the album, which is relationships ending. Lyrics such as “Even if things changed, there would be no point anyway,” leading directly into “We’d get fucked up on Fleischmann’s / and you’d dance with the cat,” paint a portrait of being stuck in a cyclical relationship. There is a lot of pain in recognizing that hope is fizzling out, and we’ve all made the mistake of holding on when it is, in fact, better for everyone involved to just let go. 

Two of the most powerful songs featured on this album are “Flesh Wound” and the closer “Digital Spliff,” which both hit on a theme of trying to find love and attention in a way that you just aren’t getting. “Flesh Wound” takes a more direct route to this as it muses on the concept of falling out of love and letting go of a strong relationship that’s begun to die. We always look at how hard it is to maintain a loving relationship, but we don’t talk about the process of walking away when that love fades.

“Digital Spliff” approaches this concept in a much different way as a tear-jerking song about the nature of being alone. The slow build at the start of the song has a lone riff accompanied by a buzzing as Swallow comes in with the lines “I started hating myself, just as much as you” and paints an image of being alone in the aftermath of an ending. He sings about seeing the house he used to call home and how it all changed: the garden out front has died, and there are cracks all over the sidewalk. The song builds as Swallow is singing about a very specific memory that locks into place with the lines “I have broken every window / in this whole goddamn place / just to see if you would hear me.” From there, a cacophony of sound erupts and carries the album to a close. In this moment of closure, as the sound surrounds you one last time, a warmth leads to the thought, “I am not alone,” as the music dies and you are left with your thoughts again. 

The Casper Fight Scene have created a diverse emo rock sound that is highly danceable with soaring hooks and incredible guitarwork that features some of the most emotionally crushing lyrics you are likely to ever hear a crowd scream back. This album is highly relatable and deeply vulnerable, as Swallow’s songwriting puts many of his past relationships and mistakes into the light. It is in this light, however, that each person who listens to this album will be able to find the face of someone to remind them that they aren’t the only one out there struggling and that there is so much life to be had after your worst mistakes. 

Ben Parker is an emo kid from a small town in Indiana who has spent a little too much time reflecting on life. Ben is a poet and has written about topics ranging from death to addiction to that feeling when you meet someone, and once you part, you realize you’ll never speak again. Ben can be found at @Benyamin_Parker on all social media.