I Hate Music Part 1: An Abridged History of Loving Carpool
/When Chris “Stoph” Colasanto sent me the new Carpool album back in November, I had never been more excited to open a Dropbox link in my life. I’ve been a music geek forever, and even though this blog is nine years old, it never fails to blow my mind when a band I love sends me their music.
On a surface level, it’s cool to hear an album early before the rest of the world, but on a much deeper level, it means a lot when an artist trusts you with their creations. That also extends to labels and PR people, but when it comes directly from a band member like this, it truly means the world.
In the case of Carpool, the punk rock four-piece from Rochester, New York, the group had become a quick favorite of mine over the course of 2020. In a year that was crushing, demoralizing, terrifying, and destabilizing in its own uniquely hellish way, Carpool’s music offered me a brilliant ray of optimism that cut through the darkness.
The whole thing started with a premiere for “Come Thru Cool (Punk Ass)” that I wrote in early May. We were two months into being sequestered in our homes, and everyone was starting to get a bit of cabin fever. I took the single because it sounded like a fun thing to work on, plus the track was a fucking rager. The screamed vocals evoked equal parts Prince Daddy and Every Time I Die, which was a combo I could fully get behind. I also loved how the song churned into this heavy metal tantrum but still managed to have super catchy verses.
I didn’t think much about Carpool for the next month until the release of Erotic Nightmare Summer on June 5th. I gave the album a listen. Then another. And another. Gradually, I found myself drawn to the record on a pure, unthinking, gravitational level, and the whole thing became muscle memory. Didn’t know what I wanted to listen to? Throw on Carpool. Driving around the winding mountain roads of Denver? Throw on Carpool. Running errands between my apartment, the dispensary, and the grocery store? Throw on Carpool. It became omnipresent and comforting in the best way possible.
Erotic Nightmare Summer ended up soundtracking my year in a way I never could have predicted. The album’s 30-minute run time made the whole thing a breeze that I could slot into my day at any point. The record had an infectious vibe with flashy guitarwork, tight instrumentation, and heaps of hooks that I eventually got pretty good at singing from the comfort of my car.
Much like the band’s first collection of songs, Erotic Nightmare Summer is still an album steeped in emo stylings, including lots of guitar tapping, group chants, silly samples, and a lyrical run-down of fucked-up behavior. It’s easy to discount “emo” as a descriptor for an almost infinite number of reasons. The genre has had many lives, revivals, periods, and shades, so it means a million things to a million different people, especially when talking to fans from different generations. No matter who you talk to, there’s bound to be a diminutive undercurrent when the word rolls off the tongue. Describing Carpool as an “emo band” sells them short because, even on this first record, they’re more than that. Lyrically, Erotic Nightmare Summer isn’t afraid to delve into heavy topics like addiction, mental health, and failing relationships, but the band navigates these topics in a catchy way that makes them go down easy. It’s actually a very multi-faceted album, even though your average person would probably listen to it and call it punk or, worse, “screamo.”
Regardless of how you personally view these ever-blurring genre lines, one thing gradually became clear to me by the time December rolled around: this was my favorite album of the year. I had spent too much time with Erotic Nightmare Sumer for my answer to be anything else.
2020 was a shit year for a lot of things, but I was grateful to have music there guiding me through the good and the bad and the incomprehensible alike. There may have been prettier albums out that year, like Saint Cloud, and even albums that felt more important, like Fetch the Bolt Cutters, but ultimately, I found myself pulled towards Erotic Nightmare Summer for its simplicity. Turns out that when the world is falling apart, the main thing I want is a hook I can sing along with and some riffs I can thrash around to.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I’m in a completely different place than I was in 2020, thank god. I was still living in Denver but found myself in an exciting new relationship with someone from New York. The long-distance thing was new to both of us, so it was hard, but it felt like we were in it together. We were honest with each other every step of the way and generally found that the beauty and love we felt in this partnership outweighed the pain of being separated by almost two thousand miles at any given time.
A long-distance relationship like this also meant lots of flying; she’d come out to hang with me in Denver, and I’d return the favor, visiting her out in New York. We went back and forth like that for months, with whirlwind week-long visits punctuated by month-long stretches where we’d talk on the phone almost every night. It was hard, but this relationship felt special enough that it was all worth it.
Sometime in July of 2022, I got a text from Stoph with a link to a new EP from Carpool titled For Nasal Use Only. I excitedly loaded the files onto my phone and spent the back half of the summer familiarizing myself with the five-pack of new offerings from the band. Specifically, I would throw this EP on during many of these long flights to visit my girlfriend out on the East Coast. Songs like “Tommy’s Car” felt like they perfectly articulated the type of love, commitment, and desire for self-betterment that I was feeling at that time. Obviously, the EP’s one overt love song, “Discretion of Possession,” hit that spot too, but as a whole, this collection of songs felt like a shockingly accurate depiction of where I found myself in this new relationship, including all the worries and possible fuck-ups that come with it.
It’s also worth noting that I had access to these files with zero other information: no album art, no tracklist, and even a misspelling of “Discresion,” which is now a stain on my last.fm account forever. I listened to the songs in the sequence I imagined the band would place them in, but I would also sometimes just let them run in alphabetical order. It led to an interesting relationship with the EP where this pit-stop in the band’s discography morphed into an interactive piece that shifted from one listen to the next. The songs became abstracted in a cool way, but no matter what order I played them in, they all still hung together as a fun-loving 15-minute excursion that built out the exact type of hookiness I loved on Erotic Nightmare Summer.
I still vividly remember playing “Everyone’s Happy” when my girlfriend and I were dogsitting for a friend in New York. It was months before the song would become publicly available, and it felt so special to be walking around the streets of Brooklyn chanting the song’s coda quietly to myself while walking to get a bagel. I know Rochester and New York City are very different things, but I still felt the power of the Empire State flowing through me.
By the end of the summer, Carpool had officially reemerged with “Anime Flashbacks” as a lead single, and I was beyond excited to see the public’s reaction. I liked the song a lot, but its heavy addition of synth felt like a wary step away from the all-out rock we heard from the band on their debut LP. Again, receiving music early results in this interesting phenomenon, which almost places you alongside the band, wondering how these songs will be received.
2023 was largely a year of planning for Carpool as the band prepared to drop their sophomore album, My Life In Subtitles. They brought on bassist/vocalist Torri Ross, who brought an excitable, rambunctious energy to the band’s live performances, along with some killer backing vocals, rounding out the group in the best way. With this new lineup solidified, the band took to the road, performing up and down the country, cutting their teeth on the classics and testing out new material alike. They played an hour-long battle set at Fauxchella VI in Ohio, and after seeing this incarnation of Carpool’s lineup, all I knew was that I wanted more. The band’s battle set saw them facing off against Summerbruise, another perennial favorite of this blog, which resulted in an elated 60-minute stretch of my life that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
Even without a new record, 2023 continued to be a pretty eventful year for Carpool. They went Ridiculousness-level viral when this video of Stoph puking while playing a gig spread like wildfire on Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. The band even found a bootleg screen-recorded version that had its own millions of views exclusively from within a Spanish Facebook page. The group ripped a flu-game-style set at Fest 21 in Florida while members of the band were under the weather, and I know it just constantly sounds like Carpool is constantly sick, contagious, or puking, but they had a lot of normal gigs too, like this one at a skatepark in Milwaukee, that looked like the set of a damn movie. Perhaps most importantly, by November, the band signaled their next level-up when they signed to SideOneDummy and dropped the first single of their new LP. Everything was in motion.
When Stoph sent me a text with the new Carpool album back in November, I had never been more excited to receive a Dropbox link in my entire life. I clicked on the link, and my eyes skittered across all 12 song titles, mind racing with what each could contain. I pressed “download” and started to do my favorite thing: edit metadata. I converted the WAV files to MP3, dragged them into my iTunes library, and synched my phone as if this access could be revoked at any moment. I didn’t even have the album art, but I had the new album from fucking Carpool months before most of the world, and with great power comes great appreciation.
I didn’t want to just half-attentively throw this album on in the background while I worked; I wanted my first listen to be intentional and meaningful. I tend to have this problem with artists I love where I’ll wind up waiting weeks, months, or even years to listen to their newest material because I loved their last project so much. For example, I’m a big Wonder Years Guy, and that love definitely extends to Aaron West, solo material, and pretty much anything Dan Campbell touches. I loved the first Aaron West album so much that when the group released their follow-up in 2019, it took me a whole month to work myself up to listening to it just because I wanted to experience it under the “right circumstances.”
Carpool had released my album of the year just a few years prior, so this new LP wasn’t something I was going to treat lightly. I wanted to make sure that whenever I sat down and hit play, I’d have enough time to make it to the end. I wanted to put my phone away and listen undistracted, fully absorbed in the music, to take it all in at once.
Photo by Bridget Hagen
My Life In Subtitles sat on my phone for a week or two until I found myself up in New York for Thanksgiving with my girlfriend’s family. The day before Thanksgiving, she and I woke up early and raced to Grand Central Station to take the Metro North up to Connecticut where the rest of her family was spending the holiday. It was my first time visiting the iconic train station or taking a train out of the city, and my little West Coast brain was just taking in the swirl of activity: college kids traveling to visit their families in other states, people with laptops and real adult clothes getting work done on their commute, various couples watching as the world raced by outside the window.
Like many of my New York Firsts, this train ride quickly became a core memory. After we had made it out of the city and into the (slightly) more pastoral scenery of northern New York, the cabin began to settle in and quiet down. With over an hour left in the trip, I decided that this would be the perfect time to venture into Carpool’s new record.
I pulled out my phone, popped in my AirPods, and hit play on My Life In Subtitles. Then the craziest thing happened. I only kind of liked it.
By this point, I had already heard, written about, and loved the lead single “Can We Just Get High?” but the rest of the album didn’t quite connect immediately. I remember firing off an excited message to Stoph when Cliffdiver’s Briana Wright popped up on “Open Container Blues,” a text that simply read “Cliffdiver!?!?” which I meant to intone like the Tiffany Pollard Beyoncé meme. I remember my brain doing backflips when I heard the “OOH OOH OOH” at the end of “I Hate Music,” but other than that, the album played out, and nothing grabbed me quite like any of the songs off Erotic Nightmare Summer. Weird.
At first, I dismissed this as a one-off experience. Deciding to tie my first listen to such a novel trip might have been too ambitious. Sure, this first impression on the Metro North was memorable, but maybe not the best way to experience an album for the first time. I gave the record a few more spins throughout December and the new year and gradually came to an interesting conclusion about the arc of the album. After listening to it enough times, I began to view My Life In Subtitles in three acts:
A beginning stretch starting with the introductory title track and winding across the first two singles through “Crocodile Tears.”
A more pensive middle stretch starting with “Done Paying Taxes” and ending with “No News Is Good News.”
A leave-it-all-on-the-floor final act starting with “I Hate Music” through the end of the record.
For a while, I straight-up didn’t like this middle stretch of the album. The songs were sadder and slower and felt far away from the peppy pop-punk shreddin’ of the band’s prior work. At one point, I even took the time to make a reqesuenced playlist, combining my favorite songs off Subtitles and Nasal Use into one album-length experience that flowed in its own way. It wasn’t that I outright hated any of these songs; I was just toying around with them as individual pieces in a way you do whenever you’re a deep enough fan of anything.
I’d throw on the new Carpool album once every week or so throughout the new year, continuing to digest it, and each time, I’d find little moments that would jump out to me: lyrics or instrumental bits that would land differently than the last time I heard them. I still viewed the album in these three acts and still generally liked the first and third better than the middle, but that ebb and flow gradually just started to feel like part of the journey.
I suppose I can cut straight to the chase and say I actually like the album a lot more now, especially after seeing some of these songs live. A comparison that at one point felt astute to me was lining up these two Carpool albums with Nirvana’s last two albums. Much like Nirvana stacked hook after hook on Nevermind, Carpool backed a bunch of rockin’, cheery(-sounding), sing-along hooks against each other. Then, much like Nirvana got darker, angrier, and a little more writerly on In Utero, Carpool have created something that’s more challenging, engaging, and interesting than a record full of hooks.
On My Life In Subtitles, the band takes you on this winding overview of their life, which is also your life for the entire duration of the record. They absorb you into this world, make you invested in their journey, and then deposit you off safe and sound with a beautiful little piano loop. This experience is broken down in loving detail through this blog’s own review, one I actually didn’t write but am in total alignment with from an editorial standpoint. I really do think the album is brilliant in a lot of ways, from the songwriting and the instrumentals to the design and packaging to the multitude of music videos they were able to create in the lead-up to its release. Everything culminates in one big, swirling 40-minute monument that acts as much as a document of a life as it is a document about life.
That brings me to the real core of this piece because, in March, I joined Carpool on the road for four days, catching the band’s first three shows of the year and their album release on Friday, March 22nd. Of course, this was a dream come true. To be able to take time off work and follow a band on the road is something I would never have imagined in the early days of this blog, and I was only able to achieve this through covering a band, engaging with their work, and developing a relationship with them that felt like it was built on mutual admiration.
I didn’t let on about my initial reservations about the album; I still enjoyed it and didn’t want the band members to think I was there for anything else. I believe in Carpool and felt grateful they would open their band up to me in any way, so I asked them, and they said yes the same day. Fucking awesome.
I enlisted the help of Joshua Sullivan, a local friend, filmmaker, and musician in his own right who knew how to work a camera. At the time, Josh was actually in the process of finishing up his own feature-length film, all shot, edited, and released DIY, which was a scale and ambition I admired. The two of us had already spent a few long nights nerding out about music, so I knew he’d gel with Carpool, too. On March 21st, we drove up to meet the band in Richmond, Virginia, for night one of the tour. We were officially on the road with Carpool.
Click here to watch the full tour documentary and read part 2 of this essay.
