The Kid is Emphatically Not All Right

About two weeks ago, I was a little inebriated and a little lonely in the middle of the holiday season. I avoided any sort of disastrous texting mishaps, but I fell headfirst into a downhill diatribe against Beach Slang's debut LP The Things We Do to Find the People Who Feel like Us. The title, though not succinctly, encapsulates the lengths and risks taken by outsiders and margin-walkers to connect with others. It also adequately summarizes at least one phase of the life-long friendships I've made. If I had written the album, I would've titled it The Things We Do to Maintain the Relationships with the People Who Feel like Us. One of those things is texting your friends how you maybe gotta lay off the new Turnover because "emotions." 

As hastily as I wrote my "review" of Beach Slang's full length, I deleted it. I did so because I thought the "discourse level" wasn't "high" enough, but I don't necessarily write on this blog to bandy about two dollar words. That's what essays are for.

Really, I deleted that post because it was a raw nerve. What bugged me so much about the Beach Slang album was its veneer of triumph and contentment. This is a profoundly unhappy album, but it is also an album that refuses to recognize in any external way its own unhappiness. Instead, it trades in honest self-evaluation with determined masquerading. The product, however, is a not-so-deceptive peak into the very real despair of Paul Westerberg, a 40-something punk who's writing late-night anthems for teenagers. After two decades in the punk rock scene, he's finally figured out the formula for portraying all the glittering euphoria of lovelorn outsiders. I'm just not convinced he's actually thrilled about it.

The Things We Do is a redundant album. It sounds like the 2014 EPs but sleeker and less virile. It also just repeats itself in a nauseating cascade of simulacra. Westerberg knows how to rhyme to sounds: uh and aye. Things are fucked, you've done some drugs, you've fallen in love, it's never enough. But it's all right because this is life and we're alive and it's our time and that time is night. 

That's the entirety of the album right there. Before I listened to the album, I wondered why the hell the band was doing an interview with People magazine. Now I get it. This is punk rock at its most digestible. Beach Slang's 7"s from last year weren't the rawest or ugliest albums, but they still had an edge, enough of one to bolster the warmth of the band's message. They stripped all of that away for the LP, though, leaving this shiny reminder of what Westerberg went through decades ago but can't forget. 

In a way, though, The Things We Do is exactly what it should be. It is a patently false picture of happiness and contentedness, but it veils its sorrow so thinly that it begs you to see through the sheen fabric to the exposed nerve underneath. When considered in that light, it's kind of genius. It's a trojan horse of self-evaluation, one whose effrontery is only heightened by how much it actually reflects the listener's own morosity and shameless attempts to hide those feelings.

After the attack, though, the trojan horse is left empty - a hollowed out ruse with a singular function. Once you've figured out Beach Slang's dark secret on The Things We Do, the album has nothing left to offer. 

Also - come up with another fucking song pattern. Jeez.