Blab School – Blab School | Album Review

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Fort Lowell Records

When you grow up in the orbit of an older brother, especially an older brother who could be considered “cool,” there is a sort of unapproachable quality to the bands he listens to… Or at least I think that’s how it is; I don't actually have any older siblings, cool or otherwise.

This is a long walk, but go with me.

I was twelve years old in the year 2000, so all the cool older brothers in my orbit were into bands like AFI, Deftones, Green Day, Bad Religion, Nirvana, Tool, Nine Inch Nails, etc., etc. Being one step removed from these bands may have actually made them seem even more unapproachable and cooler to me. There was something about the scorching disaffection and pseudo-masculine rage of this era of music that I found dangerously alluring at the time. It felt like I was getting into these bands at my own risk, which was part of the appeal.

Blab School’s self-titled debut album reminds me of this era of rock music, not necessarily in tone and sound, but in pure, intimidating coolness.

So, how does one talk about a band whose defining characteristic is that they sound cool? They say comparison is the thief of joy, but this is a band that wears its influences on its sleeve. In addition to my projecting the likes of Deftones, AFI, and Tool onto Blab School, it’s easy to hear the bands they’ve been openly inspired by. In their bio on the Fort Lowell Records website, they namecheck the Wipers, Talking Heads, Joy Division, and Killing Joke as their sonic and philosophical progenitors. More contemporaneously, it wouldn’t be out of the question to see them sharing a bill with bands like Flasher or Protomartyr. This is a record that is steeped in nostalgia, but you’re going to have to adjust your idea of whose past lives we are talking about when we use the word “nostalgia,” this isn’t The Strokes or The Black Keys.

Blab School doesn’t have a narrative arc; that’s not the kind of band they are. In fact, the record is a pretty lean affair, clocking in at just over in just over twenty minutes. Blab School is not trying to tell a story with this record, but that is not to say that they aren’t trying to convey a feeling, and that feeling is chilly disaffection. This fire-and-ice combination of unattainable coolness and simmering rage puts them in a lineage with every band they have likened to by both me and the band themselves. It’s also a proven method for creating compelling music.

This can be heard from the jump with the first two tracks: “Small Simple Ways” and "Scrolls." The former sounds like it would fit beautifully alongside The Smashing Pumpkins on the Batman & Robin soundtrack, and I mean that in the best way possible. The latter is a particular favorite of the band, as it is the first song they wrote post-lockdown, which seems appropriate for a song about doomscrolling (“can’t seem to stop, I’m clicking on buttons, just staring at nothing, back to the top… scroll down, scroll down”). This feeling of dissatisfaction with modern society is on display throughout the record, from “Quit Yr Job” (particularly poignant to me as I write this article while on the clock at a job I’m getting laid off from at the end of the month), to “Never Enough” (we all hate capitalism in this house), to the closing track, “(Don’t Forget to) Give Up” (try the refreshing taste of nihilism today).

But one of the most fascinating tracks on the record is “I Hate the Summer.” On this penultimate track, the band sings, “I hate the summer, I pray for rain. I hate the sunlight, mimosas, and champagne. I hate the beach and all the sand it brings. I hate the blue skies; I hate most hot-weather things.” They’ve got that summertime sadness! Now I’m from Ohio and Blab School is from North Carolina, so we experience very different summers, but I have always found folks that detest the sun and revelry of summertime a little… dorky? But you see, that’s what makes this song so important! In the context of the record, it might be the most important song of all. I’ve gone on and on about how impenetrably cool this band is for this entire article, and we get to the second-to-last song on the album, and it’s just someone whinging about how they’re too hot? It’s brilliant! It makes them human! It invites other dorky folks who get cranky when the weather gets above 72° to be like, “Yeah! They get it!” before bringing it back around to the realm of the unfathomable and the unflappable to wrap things up with “(Don’t Forget to) Give Up.”

Ultimately, there’s something to be said here about the anachronistic idea of “coolness.” What does it even mean to be “cool” in 2024 when the internet has rendered each and every one of us “cringe”? That may be overstating it, but at the very least, social media has revealed that most of us are relatively ordinary in our day-to-day lives... or maybe it’s just leveled the playing field. You can see pictures of Blab School all together as a band on their Instagram, and they look very normal despite the fact that they have made a profoundly cool record. They just look like me and my friends, and I appreciate them more for it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you can see that as a testament to everyone’s humanity. Just as your friends’ cool older brothers eventually become regular accountants, bitcoin miners, and managers at Chipotle, cool rock musicians are regular people, too. The coolness is part of the performance.

Brad Walker is a writer, comedian, and storyteller from Columbus, Ohio. Find him on the World Wide Web: @bradurdaynightlive on Instagram and @bradurdaynightlive.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Peter Bibby – Drama King | Album Review

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Spinning Top Records

I’m no stranger to drunken chaos. There’s the time in my sophomore year of college when I blacked out at a sorority pregame and was “asked” to please go home. Or junior year when my roommate took me to her date party, and I spent the whole time puking in the club bathroom after too many tequila shots. Or the many, many instances of chugging from plandles in frat basements and then promptly getting on a table for the rest of the night. What I’m saying is I, like many others, spent a good chunk of my late teens-early twenties leaning into a drunken menace version of myself and consistently ignoring my limits. 

Then, at some point, due to either a growing self-awareness or a developing anxiety disorder, embarrassment kicked in. I’d cringe at friends’ tales of my antics from previous nights, wonder what people were saying about me, and hope to god I didn’t run into anyone important. This started to happen at the same time the world shut down, so I took it as a great chance to get some distance from alcohol altogether. By the end of college, I would barely finish one drink on any given night. Nowadays, I’m scared to even get buzzed, and the last place you’d find me is the club. I soberly threw up from heat exhaustion at a Cass McCombs’ show at Union Pool last summer, and the number one worry I had was anyone in my vicinity thinking I was a messy drunk who couldn’t handle herself. 

The people’s prince of Perth, Peter Bibby, has gone through a similar sober renaissance as of late. His newest record, Drama King, chronicles his back-and-forth between leaning into the numbing effect of alcohol and realizing the damage it is instigating. Being recently sober himself, the Aussie rocker explores the internal dialogue that comes with overcoming your dependence on alcohol and getting increasingly dissatisfied with the partying experiences you once found life-changing. 

A through-and-through independent, Drama King marks Bibby’s first time working with producer Dan Luscombe, or any producer, for that matter. With this new partnership, the production and instrumentals are crisp, consuming, and chaotic, with sonic highs and lows that mirror the often unstable path to sobriety. There’s country twang on opener “The Arsehole” and B-side “Old DC,” near-metal guitar thrashes on “Fun Guy” and “Bruno,” and reflective ballads on “Companion Pony” and “Baby Squid.” These elements exist separately and together, like on “Baby Squid,” which takes a waltzy track brimming with strife and completely blows it out by the end, with a ripping guitar solo and guttural vocal delivery that perfectly encapsulates the duality of what it takes to get sober. “Fun Guy” gives a glimpse of the anger that comes with realizing substances aren’t working for you but not quite being ready to give them up. The track blends surf rock with death metal guitar riffs, similar to King Gizzard’s PetroDragonic Apocalypse, ripping through the speakers with an intensity that matches the pure disgust our protagonist has for his old party routine.

Bibby looks at sobriety from all sides, giving us POVs of him at his worst and his most confident. “The Pricks” tells a story of a bar fight, complete with slurring vocals that clash with the major key pop rock instrumentals. Meanwhile, the jangly opener, “The Arsehole,” provides a thesis statement for the entire album with the line, “No one seems to come and talk to me / ‘cuz I’m the arsehole / It’s plain to see.” Bibby has a vocal style akin to Courtney Barnett’s conversational half-spoken-word delivery, adding another layer of personality and emotion to the whole LP. 

On “Bruno,” we see the distaste Bibby has for his party persona in lyrics like “Bruno is a piece of shit / He’s got no idea and nowhere to get one,” which show his frustration with the endless cycle of knowing you’re drinking too much but not being able to stop. Lyrically, Bibby is extremely blunt about his past. It’s clear he’s getting sick of his blackouts with the lines like “And all my dreams they fade away / No faces and no names / I’m getting tired of it” on “Old DC,” a track that juxtaposes Americana country twang with somewhat crass and unforgiving lines about being stuck in bad habits.

“Terracotta Brick” is one of the most revealing and personal tracks on the album. Bibby speaks to his lowest points through a metaphor of building a wall around him to block out any potential help, emphasizing the loop he finds himself stuck in when it comes to alcohol (“And you’re part of a vicious cycle / That keeps on spinning round”). You can hear Bibby’s inner turmoil in his vocals, with the guitar and piano sauntering around him and providing the truest ‘ballad’ on the record. “Terracotta Brick” is an emotional low, but it’s also a high in showing that Bibby is aware of his self-destructive tendencies around alcohol, which is necessary to push past them eventually.

Album closer “Companion Pony” explores Bibby’s desires for partnership and how alcohol had previously ruined potential relationships. Bibby compares himself to a lonely old racehorse looking to escape the intensity of derby life. It turns from a pretty depressing song to one with a hopeful end, hinting at a positive path forward. The track gains momentum and incorporates choral backing vocals and bright pianos, leaning into the idea of coming out on the other side of the uphill battle that is sobriety. The last lines of the record give a very ‘running off into the sunset’ happy ending to the whole story: “He’s gonna run / Over the hill / Around the bend / Jump right over the electric fence / Find that companion pony / And they’ll keep on running.”

Cassidy is a music writer and cultural researcher currently based in Brooklyn. She loves many things, including but not limited to rabbit holes, Caroline Polachek, blueberry pancakes, her cat Seamus, and adding to her record collection. She is on Twitter @cassidynicolee_, and you can check out more of her writing on Medium. 

Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties – In Lieu of Flowers | Album Review

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Hopeless Records

Buffalo Bills faithful Aaron West can’t seem to catch a break these days—or ever. On In Lieu of Flowers, the third full-length album of Dan Campbell’s solo project, we find West most chained to his vices.

Anyone familiar with Campbell’s songwriting in The Wonder Years knows the man is sick with nostalgia. It pierces through his writing like no other, yet he continuously finds ways to keep it rewarding and refreshing. When TWY released The Greatest Generation in 2013, the pop-punk cognoscenti declared the band’s three-album run triumphant. The Philadelphian six-piece had successfully crafted a trilogy on growing up and, in the process, had created something larger than themselves that millions of fans connected with, even a decade later. Even with this achievement, the band continued to write and release albums, although they had largely laid their signature pop-punk sound to rest. 

A year after TWY cemented themselves as pop-punk royalty, Aaron West was born. Campbell’s construction of “Aaron West” speaks to the ever-growing nature and evolution of his songwriting. He carefully crafted West as a snake-bitten alcoholic musician from New Jersey who struggles in the way most of us do. His music career is faltering, his relationship is crumbling, and his loved ones are dying. At heart, Campbell is a storyteller who’s found his niche in songwriting, and as we come upon the end of yet another trilogy in his musical universe, there’s no question as to why everything he touches turns to gold.

Before diving into In Lieu of Flowers, I would be remiss not to start at the project’s debut album since the Aaron West albums all tell a very intentional chronological story. As a brief recap of We Don’t Have Each Other, the inception of Aaron West details the worst year of his life in which his father passes, his wife suffers a miscarriage, and his wife leaves him. This is all capped off with his contemplation of drowning himself in the ocean, chased by a Mountain Goats cover that acts as a palette cleanser. Now, another EP, single, and album’s worth of lore has conspired in the 10 years since that first dispatch, however, the most important aspect to know going into ILOF is that, despite slapping band-aids on old wounds, we find that West never took the time to properly heal from the events of that fateful year depicted on his first album.

ILOF kicks off with our nomadic protagonist claiming, “It feels like shit to be alone again.” Track one of the LP, “Smoking Rooms,” starts somber and explodes into an existential apex torn between the less-than-glamorous life of a solo musician and being someone his family can count on.

This, more than anything, seems to be the all-encapsulating theme of the album. On the project’s sophomore release, Routine Maintenance, we listen as the project grows from just Aaron West to Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties. He comes to find family and meaning in what began merely as a solo project to sing his woes. Additionally, he finds meaning in life with his nephew Colin that he couldn’t find anywhere else. With both of their dad’s abrupt passings, West took it upon himself to be the father figure that both were suddenly lacking. Fast forward five years and West’s neglect of his mental health has begun to chip away at everything he once found joy in.

The third installment of Aaron West’s story leans into his folk-tinged americana sound more than ever. Track three, “Paying Bills at the End of the World,” most notably pays homage to this sound with West singing the blues set to the melancholic wanes of the lap steel. The lyrics update the listener on the lull in West’s life during the global pandemic of 2020. He sings the sorrows of every malcontent US citizen that year: dreaming of catching COVID and simply dying because we can't afford health insurance.

In spite of all the gloom in his world, Campbell still injects humor and irony into his writing. In the same song, we hear West whimper, “Of doves and palms and cartoon Jesus dying on the cross I say he must be running late.” Poking fun at his broken relationship with religion, the band’s music video for this song ironically takes place in a church. 

While this project is a concept at its core, it takes place in the world as we know it. West, like the rest of us, put our lives on pause while COVID ran rampant through the world. Campbell uses this to further push the authenticity of the project. He weaves truths throughout West’s story, as seen on track 5, “Alone at St. Luke’s.” During an IRL 2022 tour, the Twenties all caught COVID, with Campbell being the only one to duck the sickness. The band was forced to fly home and Campbell stayed in Glasgow to finish the tour solo. It’s also in this track where we get a call back to LP1 highlight “Get Me Out of Here Alive,” in which West now claims that “The stained-glass light just punched me in the chest.”

Additionally, Campbell did his due diligence in crafting the character of Aaron West. He describes the character as “a little bit of everyone I’ve ever met”. What makes Aaron West’s story so special is this genuineness. Campbell entwines truths and lived experiences into his fictional character, which contributes to its legitimacy. While there are parts of the story that Campbell admits to having happened in real life, we’ll truly never know what parts are and are not fictitious. Despite this, the listener doesn’t doubt that any of the events in West’s trilogy are fabricated because they deal with very real and dwelled human troubles.

Photo by Mitchell Wojick

My favorite aspect of this album is how it contains the first-ever love song we get from Aaron West. After rekindling with an old flame from high school early on the album, we find the first occurrence of West showing even the slightest amount of interest in someone romantically who is not Diane, his ex-wife. A new character in the Aaron West story is introduced on track 4, “Monongahela Park.” Sam, whom West hadn’t seen in years, knows nothing of the West that we’ve come to know and love. Even with this opportunity to start fresh, West’s calloused heart can’t bring himself to let her in.

Believe it or not, ILOF is also the most emo we find Aaron West. He’s in a begrudgingly sour fight with himself and what he wants in life. Between the band, his broken love life, his lack of belief in a higher power, and his surging alcoholism, West is tearing at the seams. Tracks 6 and 7 are where we get the lowest of West. Hanging onto every last bit of popularity from the Twenties’ fizzling fame, West is burning every last bridge in an alcohol-fueled frenzy as he exclaims, “I’ll see you in the water.”

Regardless of how much West wants to give up and succumb to his addiction, the people in his life won’t let him. After checking himself into rehab on track 9, “Runnin’ Out of Excuses,” West finds his next move. The track starts slow over piano, with West watching the Bills choke away yet another promising year. It moves into an upbeat and nostalgia-lined recap of his time in rehab. West acknowledging his fuck ups bring us that much closer to the album's penultimate track, “In Lieu of Flowers.”

The track was released as the first single with the announcement of the album, likely because it’s the most conquering track on the record, however, we now know that this song ties up all the loose ends of the album. Listening to this track before and after knowing the events of the album reframes the song's meaning. Kicking off the track with a catchy horn melody contributed by producer Ace Enders, the song hooks listeners instantly. It’s in this track where West is mending the bridges that he burnt throughout the album. Even though Sam, his nephew Colin, his sister Catherine and the Twenties “could’ve told him to fuck himself,” they encourage him to brush the dirt off the grave that he dug for himself.

Photo by Mitchell Wojick

There are a million story beats and easter eggs that can be found throughout the Aaron West discography, and that’s what makes it so enjoyable to dig into. At this point in his story, every track is a must-listen, not just for the musical brilliance, but to catch every detail that caps off what could be the end of the Aaron West story. The bookend tale divulges the struggles of family, love, and religion. Much like those Bills teams of the 2000s, West was struggling to get his shit together long enough to reap the harvest. He found support and solace in those he thought would leave him for dead.

What makes The Wonder Years everyone’s favorite pop-punk band is that they’re entirely relatable. Campbell finds ways to craft songs that are universal no matter the subject matter. The madman has managed to lap this feat and do it all over again with Aaron West. While little is known about the future of West, the listener, without a doubt, is rooting for him. He may be a fictional character, but West is as real as you and I: flawed to all hell, but is trying his best. 

Brandon Cortez is a writer/musician residing in El Paso, Texas, with his girlfriend and two cats. When not playing in shitty local emo bands, you can find him grinding Elden Ring on his second cup of cold brew. Find him on Twitter @numetalrev.

Fell In Love With a Guac: Making Jack White’s Guacamole Recipe

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A couple of months ago, emo band Michael Cera Palin made a jokey post about Pavement's hospitality rider on Twitter, and the internet rightfully couldn’t put it down. Between the quantity and the specificity of the items listed, the jokes practically wrote themselves. “forty-eight cold bottles of premium domestic beer,” hell yeah, brother. A couple of entries later, they list “two bottles of premium red wine” with a parenthetical that specifies “(nothing under $10.00 retail, PLEASE).” These guys know their stuff. 

Something else I love about Pavement’s rider is that there’s an abundance of emphasis, with some words in bold and others in ALL CAPS, lending the whole list a sort of manic Christopher Walken tone. You can practically envision the band members bouncing ideas off each other as they had a stoned brainstorm, throwing “5 cups assorted yogurt” next to “one jar chunky natural peanut butter.” The whole document is a rich text that you could spend hours parsing through and picking out individually hilarious items. Spicy V8? Why? “Authentic” pita bread? What’s the alternative? Four nine-volt batteries (Energizer)? I guess it’s nice to know where their brand affinity lies.

This came hot on the heels of a wider discussion about how bands eat on tour, sparked by a snippy comment leveled at indie rockers Thank You, I’m Sorry. For days on end, internet commentators and armchair analysts filled my feed with criticisms, jokes, and accusations, all levied at bands with less than 100k monthly listeners on Spotify. The whole thing reeked of the (surprisingly pervasive) anti-artist stance that musicians should expect to be miserable on the road if they expect to break even on a tour.

However, one good thing to come from this was a rider posted by Charly Bliss containing Jack White’s tour rider. The list even starts out funny, with its first entry being “6 x cans of  Coke Zero.” Okay, skinnyyyy. The second entry moves from beverages to food as they ask for “1 dozen chicken wings” with a fun note specifying “(buffalo, teriyaki, surprise us).” Alright, these guys know how to have fun. One line later, we get to the main event, “1 bowl FRESH HOME-MADE GUACAMOLE,” with a note that there’s a recipe below. The recipe, which I’ll transcribe here in full, is a seven-ingredient, multi-step process that I can only imagine a put-upon venue employee begrudgingly whipping up. I knew I had to try it. 

Jack White's Guacamole Recipe

Ingredients

  • 8 x large, ripe Haas avocados (cut in half the long way, remove the pit–SAVE THE PITS THOUGH–, and dice into large cubes with a butter knife. 3 or 4 slits down, 3 or 4 across. You’ll scoop out the chunks with a spoon, careful to maintain the avocado in fairly large chunks. 

  • 4 x vine-ripened tomatoes (diced)

  • ½ yellow onion (finely chopped)

  • 1 x full bunch cilantro (chopped)

  • 4 x Serrano peppers (de-veined and chopped)

  • 1 x lime

  • Salt & pepper to taste

Steps

Mix all ingredients in a large bowl, careful not to mush the avocados too much. We want it chunky. Once properly mixed and tested, add the pits into the guacamole and even out the top with a spoon or spatula. Add ½ lime to the top layer so you cover most of the surface with the juice. (The pits and lime will keep it from browning prematurely.) Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until served. Please don’t make it too early before it’s served. We’d love to have it around 5 pm.

Sunday, May 26th, 2024.

It’s Memorial Day weekend, and I have four days off work. Summer is right around the corner, and love is in the air… wait, that’s just a combination of Tecate and tequila. It’s already been hot enough in North Carolina that it’s felt like summer to my Pacific Northwest ass for months; even still, I’m not one to look a gift horse (long weekend) in the mouth. After a few days of kicking back and celebrating, spirits were high, and I was getting tired of BBQ food, so I decided it was finally time to pull the trigger on Jack White’s Guacamole Recipe. 

My girlfriend and I hit up our local Harris Teeter to acquire all the fresh produce necessary to feed the man who wrote “Seven Nation Army.” Turns out eight Haas avocados are more expensive than I expected. As I was staring down the 30-ish dollar total, my girlfriend joked, “This is why Millennials will never be homeowners,” and I couldn’t disagree. 

It also turns out that eight Haas avocados make a lot of guacamole. I realized this as I was rinsing the tomatoes and peppers in the sink and looked over to see my girlfriend cutting each avocado in half, seemingly doubling the amount instantaneously. She suggested halving the recipe at one point, but I was determined to make this guac in Jack White’s image, to a tee, exactly as he instructed on the rider. I would have nothing less than perfection.

Believe it or not, I’ve actually written my fair share of recipes for my job. I don’t talk about my profession here often, but it’s wild how much of 2020 and 2021 I spent wordsmithing recipes for Starbucks while everyone was trapped at home and craving their cafe fix. If you ever wanted to know how to make a Cereal Milk Coffee or a Caffè Mocha, I got you. As such, I feel like I am uniquely qualified to comment on this recipe. 

As we dug into the instructions, this mostly seemed like prep, which was a relief. Whenever a recipe says, “Mix all ingredients in a large bowl,” it’s like skipping straight to the fun part. So we got cleaning and cutting and started dumping everything into a large bowl. 

In terms of the actual recipe and instructions, it’s entertaining how much personality comes through the writing here. The line “SAVE THE PITS THOUGH,” typed in all-caps, is very urgent and funny. That phrase became a bit of a verbal tick as we were prepping the guac, akin to “save the whales” or a motto that an armpit fetishist would champion. Elsewhere, specifying to slice the avocado in “3 or 4 slits” seems like a funny detail, though it seems to be in service of consistency. The band specifies at multiple points that “We want it chunky,” which reads pretty sassy, and I have no choice but to respect it.

I deveined the serrano peppers, diced the tomatoes, and quickly started to note the mounting pounds of guacamole filling up our bowl. I asked my girlfriend to invite some friends over because I could quickly tell that we would not make so much as a dent in this guacamole if it were just the two of us. I did the same, and we soon had a group of six ready to dig into Jack White’s recipe.

The final touch was “salt & pepper to taste,” to which my girlfriend questioned, “to who’s taste?” and quickly decided that the answer was Jack White himself. We tried our best to channel our inner pale Detroiter, imagining what the palate of the man who wrote Blunderbuss could possibly entail. We salted, peppered, and made a round of margs to accompany the main event. We set everything on the table and dug in.

So, at this point, I bet you’re wondering how it was. What did Jack White’s Guacamole taste like? Turns out… kinda bland. We were eating with a group of people mainly from the south, but even to my Pacific Northwestern ass, the guac tasted pretty unremarkable. If I’m making guac, I usually use Jalapeno peppers, so the serranos were a nice twist but not enough. 

Ultimately, the group deemed the guac “easy to fix,” and we improvised a bit by adding some more lime juice, additional salt, and four or five cloves of chopped-up garlic. We wondered why this recipe didn’t call for any garlic at all, which feels like a pretty standard ingredient for most guacs, and collectively agreed that Jack White is not beating the vampire allegations. After incorporating all of those additions, we were cooking with gas and everyone happily chowed down on our new and improved Jack White Guac. 

It felt a little bad to permute Mr. White’s recipe in such a direct way; after all, you wouldn’t go in and add another guitar to “Salute Your Solution,” would you? But the way I see it, we technically made it faithfully first before perverting it into something that tasted better, so I felt like we still achieved our initial goal.

All in all, Jack White’s Guacamole was a hit once we added a bit more zap to it. The recipe makes a lot, but it’s also for a touring group of musicians, so that makes sense. Does his culinary instincts match up to his musical brilliance? Not quite, but that’s okay; I’ll take Elephant over a middle-of-the-road guacamole any day.

Polkadot – …to be crushed | Album Review

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Count Your Lucky Stars

New Year's Eve is always a bittersweet moment for me. I don’t like the dreariness of winter much, and I find the parties fairly boring – instead, I usually spend the lead-up to the special day trapped in that weird mid-holiday liminal slump. More specifically, these past few years, I have spent that time leading up to New Year's Eve just sitting in my car, often in a parking lot with the music low, contemplating how my year went, probably against my best interests. Did I change? Did anyone change? Did something change? Should I change for the new year? 

Polkadot’s sophomore album, …to be crushed, asks the same questions and, despite releasing on the precipice of summer, already feels like it's destined to soundtrack that liminal time on the precipice of a new year. Using precise melodies and sharp motifs, each song operates with certainty against looming unpredictability, seemingly invigorated by the challenge to one day move comfortably with the passing of time. As a band largely concerned with feeling weird and trying to find the words for it, this album is full of “tweemo” hooks, fuzz, and group vocals that inch closer toward the answers through profoundly confessional lyricism.

 …to be crushed starts on “Left Behind” with just the haunting presence of guitarist/vocalist Daney Espiritu’s words and the distant pluck of a guitar. Espiritu welcomes the listener into the hazy world of the album and lets the rest slowly sharpen into focus. Lyrics about loneliness and self-worth weave together as they are joined by different members of the band, one by one. Together, these instruments mimic the evenness and clarity of the lyrics. It’s a stellar opener that prepares the tone of the rest of the album – contemplative, transparent, and just hopeful enough. It also introduces the collaborative aspect of the redefined band. While Polkadot originally began as Espiritu’s solo project, it has since become a full band effort, opening places to Anton Benedicto on drums, Jordan Jones on bass, and Matthew Estolano on guitar. The first song directly reflects this evolution and, over the course of two and a half minutes, dissolves the barriers around the frustrating aspects of loneliness.

What is Heaven to you? This is a mildly jarring topic Espiritu opens the second song, “New Friends,” with. It’s a vivid and contemplative suggestion that momentarily breaks the distance between musician and listener as we picture our different versions of Heaven. Espiritu describes Heaven with a specific list: karaoke in purple lights, crawling into your arms, playing cards at a bar with friends. This prompt is a scene-setting lyric that encapsulates and encloses themes of the entire album.

“New Friends” is a song that should be, no, needs to be danced to. It has a heartbeat made for grabbing your friend’s hands and jumping around together under a venue’s rotating lights. It demands to be sung along to, face to face, or toward a stage. More than that, it’s sharing sincerity with you. Between the first two tracks, it is abundantly clear that Espiritu is operating with a level of trust between listener and artist, each lyric stitched together with an uncompromising honesty. But suddenly, the contemplation fades away, and the once-danceable melody turns into a thrashy moment to scream to instead of sway to. In “New Friends,” Espiritu sings about specific moments the listener has no reference to and no insight into, but it doesn’t matter; it’s magnetic, and for a fleeting moment, it's yours too.

There is a definitive confidence in Espiritu’s voice, one that suggests that what is being said has been considered and measured, yet an air of reluctance lingers. This makes the words all the more personal. In the bass-heavy “Baby Buzzkill,” Espiritu describes the crushing weight of your own worst thoughts that draw you to stay under your covers, hiding from what might be outside. The disappointment of the lyrics are ultimately drowned out by building distortion and even louder cymbal crashes, leaving the listener with a long buzz of static, which finalizes the emotional thread of the lyrics more effectively than words could. 

The album winds through its purple light-lit and fuzzy world before ending on “This Year.” Recalling the singular feeling of the opening track, “This Year” is a song once again started with just a distant strum and clear words; however, this time, it’s engulfed by lingering and almost eerie static – like a guitar left too close to an amp by a band that just left the stage for an encore. As Espiritu’s lyrics seem to reluctantly declare that the time for being jaded is over, a guitar whines ominously from behind, threatening an entrance into the song. A drum’s thud quickly follows as the guitar begins to weave over and under the lyrics. A cacophony is incoming, and it could happen at any time… But it doesn’t. Instead, group vocals enter and soften the blow. Together, the band repeats a single lyric, “This year is coming to an end, I don’t feel any different,” which is punctuated by a repeating kick drum beat. This is a lonesome lyric to end the album on, but the chorus of voices makes it familiar. Loneliness is tangible, yes, but it isn’t singular.

Long after the distortion fades away and the final lyric is sung, New Year’s Eve will come around, and I will once again be in that parking lot, music low, wondering if I changed. Did anyone change? Did something change? Should I change for the new year? But that has to be ignored because, from Polkadot’s perspective, it doesn’t matter. What matters are the fragments of feeling, the pieces of memory, and the persistent hope for something better. Time isn’t linear; a new year is just a new year, and there is always room for more (whatever more may be).

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.