The Wonder Years – No Closer To Heaven (10th Anniversary Edition)
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Hopeless Records
What were you up to ten years ago? This time in 2015, I was about to enter my final year of college, working a grocery store job I’d had since high school, and experiencing a palpable sense that “this might be it.” The “it” in question was some combination of innocence, childhood, and the idea that this might be the last carefree stage of my life. Way I figured, summer after this, I’d have a real job, real problems, and no “summer” to speak of, so I’d better enjoy bumming around one last time.
My semester always started late (usually the last week of September), so there was this weird lull where most everyone else would be in school and I’d be stuck watching the seasons change, just waiting to get back into an academic routine. I have distinct memories of playing a remaster of the first Gears of War with one of my childhood friends while listening to No Closer To Heaven by The Wonder Years and Rodeo by Travis Scott on repeat. Also in the mix was Too by FIDLAR, Currents by Tame Impala, and Ryan Adams’ track-for-track cover album of 1989. I was a type of guy for sure.
By this point, The Wonder Years were a band I had followed for at least a few album cycles and found a great deal of solace in. The “trilogy” run from Upsides through Suburbia and The Greatest Generation did a lot to make me feel heard, comforted, and motivated when I didn’t have a lot else doing those things for me. I remember excitedly preordering No Closer To Heaven and feverishly devouring each of the lead singles over the summer, but when the full thing came out, it was the first time I felt palpably disappointed by the band.
This was a slow reckoning, brought about only from repeated listens, mostly while I was chainsawing dudes in half while playing Gears, but also close listens on my headphones and record player. This was odd because I still recognized many of the qualities I liked in their previous albums: Dan Campbell’s lyricism was still as raw and compelling as ever, Mike Kennedy’s drumming remained energizing, and the guitar/bass section made up of Matt, Casey, Josh, and Nick had never sounded so full and muscular. The band was trying out new and exciting things, including their most pointed love songs yet, a killer feature from Jason Aalon Butler of Letlive, and some of their most dynamic songs to date. Even still, as I listened and relistened, waiting to unlock something, No Closer To Home just wasn’t landing.
What I ultimately arrived at was a problem of production and mixing (queue nerd emoji meme). At the time, I had similar issues with Suburbia, an album I found more “samey” than the Upsides that preceded it. I thought The Greatest Generation sounded perfect and that the band had righted the ship, but with No Closer To Heaven, it just felt difficult to make things out. Vocals were present, but felt buried beneath layers of padding. The bass was muddled, and the drums were subsumed by a sea of guitars. I’d chalk it up to this being a six-member band, but they had been working with this exact lineup for years at this point, so I wasn’t sure why this all sounded so murky in comparison to the album they put out just two years earlier. If you think I’m just saying this for the narrative, you can find some of my own cringey comments from a ten-year-old /r/poppunkers thread where I am making these exact complaints.
This all said, I sucked it up and absorbed the album like a dutiful fan. At the time of writing, No Closer To Heaven is my 31st-most-listened-to album of all time on last.fm, a feat I credit solely to my own standom. By now, songs like “I Don’t Like Who I Was Then” and “I Wanted So Badly to be Brave” have become live staples, while “Cardinals” has become a fan favorite, receiving a sequel years later. Even through all my nerdy criticisms of how the album sounded, I eventually came to realize that “Cigarettes & Saints” was my favorite Wonder Years song ever, even if the album it came from found itself on the lower end of my ranking.
Ten years on, the band seems to have come to some version of this realization on their own, because now we have No Closer To Heaven (10th Anniversary Edition), a full remaster of the band’s fifth studio album that rights nearly every wrong from the original version.
I’m not usually a huge believer in these types of “Remixed/Remastered” releases, as they can feel like an unearnest attempt to re-elevate a band’s best work, pulling a record to the top of the “new release” pile under the guise of something fresh. I’ll admit, a new listener might not hear a whole ton new here, but as someone who’s been trying so hard to hear the fucking bass and vocals for the past decade, this feels like re-experiencing the record again for the first time. I can finally make out individual guitars, hear specific drum patterns, and have discovered new bits of vocal inflection that I’ve never picked up on before. This is how the record was always meant to sound.
The Wonder Years have been on a retrospective tear lately, performing Upsides, Suburbia, and The Greatest Generation in full for those albums’ respective ten-year anniversaries. They’ve created songs “in the style” of those recordings, and packaged everything up in nice little box sets for fans. While there’s no tour currently announced for NCTH outside a handful of UK dates, I’m happy that the band seemed to know that this remaster was the thing fans needed most. They even tacked on “Slow Dancing With San Andreas” and the alternate version of “Palm Reader,” though the freaks like myself have been listening to those tracks for about as long as the full record has been out.
So here I sit ten years down the line. Gears of War was remastered again, and No Closer To Home has been remixed and re-released. If I close my eyes, it’s almost like nothing has changed. Then I hit play on “Brothers &” and everything is different.
