Carpool – My Life in Subtitles | Album Review

/

SideOneDummy

After working in several movie theaters throughout college, I've spent my fair share of time in projection booths. My favorite was filled floor to ceiling with old movie posters, each haphazardly taped on top of the other, with the oldest posters just barely peeking out behind the latest. The shelves were filled with odd memorabilia (Jurassic Park dinosaurs, B-list celebrity standees, promotional shirts for forgotten A24 films), and the lights were permanently low. 

Carpool’s latest album, My Life in Subtitles, takes me back to that projection booth. The Rochester band’s sophomore album captures the feeling you get watching a movie through a small glass window—the sensation of watching something bigger than you, something that excludes you, but something you still can peer in on. Projection booths are niche liminal spaces, rooms caught between an audience and invisibility. Like the complexities of the projection booth, this album operates from above, crafting story and sound from a secluded vantage point, and that all starts on the first track. 

Following a melancholy piano introduction, Carpool throws the listener directly into their lead single, “Can We Just Get High?,” a song the band dubbed the spiritual successor to their 2020 entry to the emo canon, “The Salty Song.” On the surface, “Can We Just Get High?” is a full-force rocker that feels like the rush of a sweaty beer pong win. The song has an anthemic quality that makes it feel like the performance a hot new pop-punk band would blast through at a house party during their minute-long cameo in a 2000s dramedy. The track practically demands to be chanted along with, featuring a binary chorus of, “Love me / hate me / can we just get high?” The band intersperses that kinetic energy with musical tricks that push the entire song into overdrive — extended guitar notes, signature Carpool screams, and a solo from lead guitarist Tommy Eckerson that flows like a knocked-over Miller High Life. 

In the music video, the band leans into the chaos through a disorienting backyard rager and a well-placed Animal House reference executed by bassist Torri Ross. Directors Kevin Flanagan and Christian Payment capture the surreal panic of the song through a musical fantasia of beers in the tub, high-stakes poker, and falling into a pool with your suit and tie on. The band followed this video up with one for “Open Container Blues,” a slightly more mournful track with a stunning feature from Briana Wright of Cliffdiver. While the song balances on frustration and tragedy, the video intersperses lyrics with glowing footage of the band’s joint tour in the summer of 2023. A joyous reminder that at the end of the day, Carpool will always be for sharing smiles with friends. 

The final music video released for My Life In Subtitles was for “CAR,” a post-hardcore departure from Carpool’s typical pop-tinged emo sound. With this tonal shift in music came an accompanying change in visuals. Directors Kevin Flanagan and Christian Payment moved away from the absurdity of “Can We Just Get High” and the camaraderie of “Open Container Blues” for something darker – a nightmare designed to knock listeners off-kilter and keep them on their toes. Soundtracked by his own screaming, the video depicts lyricist/vocalist/guitarist Stoph Colasanto trapped on the roof of a building and being chased through a parking garage by cloaked cult figures. For an album as thematically broad as My Life in Subtitles, the diverse array of genres and emotions depicted through the music videos do a good job representing the vast emotional complexities found throughout these songs.

Between the first stretch of songs of this album, I found myself asking, what does it mean to feel doomed? Not be doomed; just feel it. This theme is familiar territory in Carpool’s lyricism; their debut album, Erotic Nightmare Summer, was tinged with this urgency and pangs of frustration. The band’s follow-up EP, 2022’s For Nasal Use Only, offered a synthier, sunnier companion to the TV-static melancholy of ENS. It also provided a five-song glimpse into Carpool’s growing sonic capabilities, suggesting that the band was ready to fly.

Perhaps no one understands that sensation of soaring doom more than Icarus, the mythological boy who flew too close to the sun in search of freedom. Shifting away from broken-in emo and power-chord pop found in the opening stretch of the album, “Kid Icarus” sits comfortably in the middle of the record as a highly visual song with a winding, stadium-like delivery. It’s a song that takes up the whole room, with Stoph Colasanto envisioning himself as Icarus, affirming that, “If I could fly towards the sun, I would fly towards the sun.” Not to be confused with soaking up the sun, don’t get it twisted. Like many Carpool songs, the music and lyrics weave two conflicting emotions, in this case, an aerial melody paired with free-falling notions of self-doubt. That tangible longing and sense of closeness with something just out of reach echoes my projection booth memories. Do you join the crowd? Or do you keep your turmoil to yourself?

Of all the tracks on the album, “Thom York New City” was the song I found myself replaying the most: listening to it in the still of the night, listening to it while lying flat on my back and staring at the ceiling, listening to it while walking home from seeing friends. “Thom Yorke New City” is a hell of a final act. Lyrically, it illustrates the repetitive balancing act of choosing to look on the bright side even though that bright side is never guaranteed to happen, moving forward with a knowing and predicated voice. Sonically, it mirrors the flight patterns of “Kid Icarus” and calls back to the comfort of prior Carpool songs with a song-shifting drum fill from drummer Alec Westover.

 But that can’t be where this album stops, so it isn’t. Instead, My Life in Subtitles ends on punctuation, a small button in the form of “Every Time I Think of You I Smile.” This is the musical equivalent of the lights slowly coming up in a theater as the credits roll. After an album full of contemplating what it means to feel doomed in your own life despite your best efforts, this final track relies on memory to offer evidence that the doom isn’t forever and that the sky will clear eventually. This song bookends the opening titular track, forming an infinite loop of gray uncertainty turning into wavering assuredness, and then back again.

The credits end, and I am left in the projection booth, accompanied by the soft clicking of the projector. I turn it off, stretch my legs, and leave to get the broom to sweep up popcorn, reflecting on what I had just watched. I feel as if I have truly witnessed a full story play out through this album, one chronicling the ups and downs of Stoph Colasanto’s recent life and the distance between reality and subtitles—the difference between what’s said and what’s shown. 

From my view in the projection booth, I can feel the atmosphere created by this album. I immediately knew the script, the characters, and the setting, but I also didn’t know them at all because I was only watching from afar. Years of songwriting, musical experimentation, and life have gone into this record. While other Carpool projects have looked back or yearned forward, My Life in Subtitles looks from above. This is an album where the entire band soars. With its earnest lyricism, acrobatic guitar solos, and genre-shifting delivery, My Life in Subtitles is an album with altitude.

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.

Barely Civil – I'd Say I'm Not Fine | Album Review

/

Take This To Heart Records

How are you doing? Like, how are you really doing? This is a question that terrifies me, especially if it’s asked by someone who doesn't just want to make polite chit-chat.

To answer my own question, I’m not doing that great! To be honest, I’m depressed and stressed out. And I’m fully aware of how depression manifests in me: it’s less that I feel like I’m sad and more that I feel so exhausted I can't even be bothered with anything. It’s a lack of hope that things will get better, so I just either cruise or self-destruct. That’s how I’m doing right now, to be real. I’m coasting, mostly, but I want to get better.

Milwaukee emo band Barely Civil is familiar with this reality. Each song on their third LP, I’d Say I’m Not Fine, attempts to answer the question, “How are you doing? Really?” 

The sound of the drums is deafening.
I can’t take your questions at this time.
Alive in the sense that I’m not dead.
I think I would say that I’m not fine.

When asked about the lyrical themes, lead singer Connor Erickson said, “We had to, obviously, take a break when everybody else did for COVID. And the sort of pent-up frustration and aggression that came with losing your job, and losing the friendships that you have, and trying to pick up those relationships, virtually over the phone, and then try and figure out how to how to piece those back together, I started to feel like a lot of the people that I cared a lot for sort of stopped caring about me. And not in a way where I’m bitter about it, but in a way where it was just like, wow, this is the reality of the world we live in.”

Staying still now, there’s a bad man,
he’s stealing my wage.
I hope that he dies soon.
How else will I pay back my rent?
I’m taking a long walk, try to cool off,
does that make much sense?

It makes sense to me, my guy! I am also run through with a sense of exhaustion and ennui. I am trying my best, showing up faithfully to the friends around me, and mostly trying hard at work and in my other obligations. But I am tired, man. And almost everybody I know feels this way. 

Calm down. Everyone’s got doubts.

Barely Civil is Connor Erickson (vocals, guitar), Eric Doucette (bass, vocals), Alex Larsen (guitar), and Isaac Marquardt (drums).

Let me stop and say that I like Barely Civil a lot. They are the sort of band that I’ve always wanted to be in. They are aggressive, melodic, catchy as hell, and grounded in thoughtful lyrics. I rank Barely Civil with some of my favorite bands who are accomplishing this same level of poetic and musical excellence: Manchester Orchestra, mewithoutYou, Valleyheart, The World Is A Beautiful Place… Speaking of which, TWIABP’s own Chris Teti recorded and produced this record, as well as the band’s last album, 2020's I'll Figure This Out. 

Barely Civil are writing about real shit and recording music that sounds so good and fun and heavy and heartfelt. This album makes me ask myself: what do I do with the feeling of “I’m not fine”? Where does it come from? How can I move forward as if my life was a redemptive story? 

In my experience, a breakthrough is really only possible on the other side of a breakdown. Wholeness and healing only show themselves to those who are desperate enough to want to see them. Nobody builds an appetite for a better world unless they become thoroughly disgusted with the world as it is. 

And there’s plenty to be disgusted at: Working class pain. Cost of living. The feeling of loneliness that results from carrying hurt that’s invisible to others. A society that rewards unkindness. The death of childlike dreams. The pain of showing up for friends that don’t show up for you. The knowledge that you’re being taken advantage of by your bosses, by your landlord, by the system. 

There’s a desperation that manifests in anger. Where do you direct it? Smoke another cigarette? Crush another six-pack? Distract yourself again with the television or the computer? Speak unkindly to your loved ones? 

Where does relief come from? From which direction? From outside or in? What do you do with the anger in the bottom of your belly that just lives there all the time? 

If I could breathe again,
I swear I would breathe again,
I swear I would.

Barely Civil doesn’t totally give us any advice about what to do with all our frustration and disappointment, and that’s appropriate! All my favorite artists ask good questions and don’t put too much pressure on themselves to tie it up with a bow by the last track. But there are hints:

Right now I’m finding out
what it takes to feel let down.
How to take that and swallow it down.
It’s a process, but I digress.
I’m shaping a town of stone.
It’s a new age, a singing bowl.
It’s a belly ache, a cosmic drone.
Wait, there’s that sound again.

The cosmic drone! The ancient sound from before the beginning of the world! The ineffable, the unexplainable, the unknown! Maybe there’s something there.

I’m learning to speak in tongues again.
I’m burning the candle at both ends.

I’m not sure where that breakthrough is coming from, but I, personally, really hope to experience one. It would be nice to feel like I’m in relationships where care is mutual and reciprocated, not just one-sided. It would be nice to be able to comfortably afford rent in the city I live in. Would be sick to feel like I’m able to find some answers to these lingering questions.

If a breakthrough is really on the other side of a breakdown, maybe I’m not actually in a bad spot. Regardless, it would be a nice surprise to be asked, “How are you doing?” and legitimately say, “I’m fine, actually! Things are getting better!”

Ben Sooy lives in Denver, Colorado, where he writes songs and plays guitar with his best friends in the band A Place For Owls.

Crush Fund – New Fixation | EP Review

/

Blixworld Records

I do not dance. Whenever I try to dance at a show, I feel deeply self-conscious as I shuffle my feet back and forth in a box the width of my shoulders and swing my arms out of time with the band. So I don’t dance. I do, however, find catharsis in diving into the pit occasionally. I enjoy writhing around in a mass of humanity that swirls me across the floor regardless of where I want to be. Diving into the pit is cathartic because it lets me release control of my body. I don’t have a chance to get self-conscious about my dance moves because I’m more worried about staying on my feet. 

I’ve seen Crush Fund ten times since they released their debut EP, Drama, back in 2021, and I love that their shows offer a chance for trans girls to experience liberation. Even still, I’ve never been the one to start the pit, even when they tried to peer-pressure me into it the time I saw them in D.C. But the first time I put on New Fixation, I felt compelled to dance. Any moment I found myself alone, be it in the office, the bathroom, the elevator, or the kitchen, was a chance to two-step to “Womanhood.” Only one other album has triggered this impulse: Gel’s Only Constant.

The songs on New Fixation are manifestations of the pure reactionary impulse that comes from roiling under the patriarchy. The EP’s centerpiece, “Unwanted Attention,” features vocalist and drummer Nora Knox gazing back at someone treating her like a piece of meat over a knotty, bouncy riff on the verses before things escalate to a boiling hardcore chorus. The first time the chorus comes around, we only get one run-through of it, just a taste of the feeling of pushing back, so when they immediately go into the second verse, we’re already craving another chance to shout, “fuck you! Get off my dick!” It’s a fabulous pop songwriting trick tucked into a song you can two-step with.

My favorite track is “Tender is the Night” for how it turns being desperately horny into a minute and a half of pit-churning fury. In the first verse, Knox details an illicit tryst in the park that quickly dissolves to reveal it is a masturbatory fantasy. The choruses don’t just revel in that solo pleasure; each repetition of the cyclical guitar and bass hectically races towards collapse, and each bar adds another layer of Knox’s vocals, all coming together to mimic the taut, singular sensation of the body and mind being overwhelmed by pure feeling until she finally cries out, “right there!” The short stop between the second chorus and coda is a satisfactory reprieve, a chance to catch your breath. 

While “Tender is the Night'' is all about reaching satisfaction, “W.W.Y.D.” offers no reprieve as it crams a panic attack into each 5/4 bar. Each chorus ends with the instruments piled up on each other like a car wreck before pulling themselves back together. The song is a neverending cycle of doubt in yourself and desperation for someone to tell you what to do. “W.W.Y.D.” is a song trying its hardest to keep you from dancing, but you just can’t be stopped. 

This is the beauty of Crush Fund’s version of dance music. It taps into your impulses and gives you a chance to hand off control of your body to the beat. New Fixation is an offer to dance yourself clean of your frustrations.

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 

Rosali – Bite Down | Album Review

/

Merge Records

There’s something unshakably elemental about Rosali Middleman’s music. Maybe it’s the pastoral greens she uses to color her album covers or the sweeping, naturalistic lyrics she uses to flesh out her music. Or at least when I’m listening to her rage and writhe around with her backing band, Mowed Sound, thoughts of weather are conjured. If 2021’s No Medium was a whirling storm, then Rosali’s new album, Bite Down, is the waves settling back into place, finding a rhythm that’s confident and precise. 

Bite Down finds Rosali in a new place, both figuratively and literally. In the time since her last record, she’s relocated from Philly to Asheville, something we’ve all considered doing, or maybe that’s just me. Either way, the serenity of the Blue Ridge Mountains seems to be rubbing off on her, as her fourth LP is filled with early morning music that begs you to sit on the porch with your coffee and look out at the leaves while you consider life’s possibilities. It’s funny because the album cover is unnerving, featuring a wide-eyed Rosali grinning through a shroud of leaves, resulting in a spectral sensation that goes against the grain of the naturalistic feeling found in the music. 

This meditative sentiment is captured perfectly on the album’s closer, “Make It An Offer,” as Rosali ponders, “And I’ll sit for hours gazing at the light. And I do wonder and waste my life. No, I don’t wonder if I waste my life.” The real waste is to allow these thoughts of doubt to cloud your mind. “There is hope upon me. There is reason to try,” reminds Rosali. This instinct to persevere is also present on the album’s emotional centerpiece, “Hills On Fire,” which finds Rosali pursuing love in a world that’s burning as she sings, “Hills on fire and still we climb.” Both of these songs feature mid-tempo arrangements, spotlighting her lyrics and matching the contemplative state that she finds herself in.

While the album has a wealth of soft and tender-hearted lyrics, this is far from a sleepy affair; throughout the album's 45-minute runtime, the group finds plenty of time to let loose with instrumentals that simmer and explode. Rosali and her band put together one hell of a bar rocker with “My Kind,” where she expresses her frustration of having fumbled the bag, pleading, “How am I gonna live without you?” The tightly wound “Slow Pain” shoots off sparks of guitars before igniting into a full blaze of captivating soloing. On penultimate track, “Change Is In the Form,” Rosali’s selflessness as a collaborator is on full display as she steps aside to let guitarists James Schroeder and David Nance take center stage with their dueling pyrotechnics.

None of this would be possible without the deepened collaboration between Rosali and her backing band, Mowed Sound. On No Medium, they were crafting turbulent country rockers in the vein of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, but on Bite Down, they play like a school of fish, moving together as one, yet still each member to glint in the light. Rosali might have found herself in new surroundings for this record, but the amazing thing is, you can't tell. Even more settled in and communal than her last release, Rosali seems to have found a place that feels like home.

Connor is an English professor in the Bay Area, where he lives with his partner and their cat and dog, Toni and Hachi. When he isn’t listening to music or writing about killer riffs, Connor is reading fiction and obsessing over sports.

Cheem – Fast Fashion | EP Review

/

Lonely Ghost Records

A couple of years ago, I decided to make the journey from Los Angeles to Sacramento to stay with some friends, using a Coheed and Cambria show in Berkeley as the perfect excuse for a little cross-state adventure. In an attempt to keep travel expenses down and being the perpetually car-less wonder that I am, this trek was to be made via Greyhound bus. Traveling from LA to Sacramento on a public bus is just about the longest trip you could possibly imagine, which necessitated an equally long and engaging collection of songs to pass the time as I took in the great, wide nothingness of central California farmland. 

It's no secret that I love making playlists, especially for travel, so before that trip, I decided to make a collaborative playlist and asked friends to add whatever they were jamming to at the time. Among the additions to this playlist, my friend Sierra of the New Jersey band With Sails Ahead added a song called “Pay2Play” by this band Cheem who had somehow completely slipped under my radar. If their name and bright, stylistic album cover weren’t enough to pique my interest, the music itself felt like dunking my brain in Liz Blizz flavor SoBe and impaling it like the Neversoft eyeball logo that pops up before the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater title screen. 

Listening to Cheem for the first time was like nothing I had ever experienced before – a seamless marriage of early aughts pop-punk vocals, nu-metal rapping, and the tightest rhythm section I had heard in ages. I was immediately arrested by how the band effortlessly shifted from hip-hop to ska to punk and myriad other genres, not only between songs but within the songs themselves. I’ve always found myself drawn to music that plays with various genres and subverts expectations, unafraid to test boundaries, and the way Cheem was not tethered to any one specific style quickly cemented them as one of my all-time favorites in the DIY scene. 

As the relationship between artist and listener has evolved in recent years with the advent and expansion of social media, the discussion of music classification rages on more fervently than ever before. Music fans have become so comfortable having instant access to the artists they listen to, and with that access comes the ability to make these artists aware of every conceivable opinion a listener could have on their music, unfortunately including this onslaught of hot genre takes. I consistently see this happening to the band pulses. and the endless list of genres they are told they are despite being very clear about how they classify themselves. Cheem is another one of these bands that is constantly testing the limits of genre classification. 

The members of Cheem have clearly grown up with an appreciation for multiple genres of music, and you can hear that love incorporated in their songs. In the past, I’ve described them as “a jazz band disguised as a nu-metal band disguised as a pop band.” Funky bass grooves, sharp and textured drum shuffles, heavy riffs, and the smoothest execution of the two-singer style – rapping blended with dynamic vocals reminiscent of a few particular pop-punk vocalists of yesteryear. Even within their last LP, Guilty Pleasure, their sense of style and genre is broken down and rebuilt countless times across the record’s 22-minute runtime. Cheem are a fierce amalgamation of the countless artists who have inspired them, and their latest EP release, Fast Fashion, maintains this versatile approach to their creative process, expanding on it in a fresh, explosive way. 

Immediately, listeners are thrown into this latest Cheem experience with a relentless, biting riff that is soon joined by the band’s rapper, Skye Holden, and it’s clear that “Bootleg” is nothing like the two singles that preceded the EP. Instead, it leans far more into the band’s heavy rock and hip-hop sensibilities, hitting me more like a song straight out of the Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island soundtrack. There’s a freedom in Cheem’s approach to style that allows for the most creative descriptors of their music that are never too far off the mark.

The groundwork laid in the intro track is juxtaposed by “Motorola Razr,” which perfectly encapsulates its name, boasting a distinct, mid-2000s sleekness. This track features the commanding and mesmerizing drumwork I’ve come to love from the band, frenzied pop vocals gliding over them, and irregular keyboard notes sending the listener back to a time when owning a flip phone was one’s coolest quality. Gabe Weitzman’s production on this EP amplifies each song’s most note-worthy aspects, particularly in how gorgeously every bass note and keyboard ping of “Motorola Razr” accents the main groove. The band packs their songs so neatly with various textures, and it's always a treat to hear tracks like this that let every single detail shine. 

The star of Fast Fashion for me, from first listen to every revisit, remains “Jock Horror.” It simultaneously reflects everything I love about Cheem’s signature style while continuing to defy expectations, and what we’re left with is a dark, cynical, hardcore banger. The thick textures are all there, from subtle electronic effects to consistent record scratches, all anchored by sporadic, distorted chords. Lead vocalist Sam Nazaretian’s buttery vocals sail across the pop straight-aways to balance out Skye’s harmonies and rap breaks. Approaching the end of the track, when you think there couldn’t possibly be any more surprises, Sam slides in with the cleanest “oooh girl” vocal lines I’ve ever heard. Even calling them an “earworm” is doing them a disservice. They are operating on a level as a singer that I genuinely believe future generations will look back on with the same reverence as Patrick Stump. “Jock Horror” delivers hip-hop sensibilities, hints of nu-metal, gnarly breakdowns, and more – a stylistic modern masterpiece that could be plucked from several different eras of music and is exactly what makes Cheem such a memorable act in our current musical landscape. I do think “all good things must end” because, unfortunately, this song does. 

This latest offering from Cheem acts as a powerful reminder that not only is genre usually an unnecessary way of defining music in our current climate, but in Cheem’s case, it makes absolutely no sense to confine them to any one specific box. As a writer who actively suppresses using the term “vibes” in her writing, I can’t help but describe this band as running purely on vibes alone. They don’t have time to concern themselves with inconsequential things like genre when they’re hard at work fabricating stylistic bangers straight from the Cheem pop factory. There is something in this EP for everyone, and contrary to what the title would suggest, Fast Fashion is a versatile and calculated collection of songs that will not be wearing out any time soon. 

Ciara Rhiannon (she/her) is a pathological music lover writing out of a nebulous location somewhere in the Pacific Northwest within close proximity of her two cats. She consistently appears on most socials as @rhiannon_comma, and you can read more of her musical musings over at rhiannoncomma.substack.com.