Saturday Night's Alright For Commenting: October 8th, 2016

I’ve spent the last Thursday and Friday watching the Texas Rangers get pummeled by a batch of swashbuckling, dong-busting, walk-inducing, Toronto Blue Jays. And I was very sad. I’ve spent all this life waiting for this stupid baseball team to win a stupid championship. Every year it doesn’t happen is just another grain falling down to the bottom. Another year closer to it never ever happening.

And the way it’s happened. Devoid of hope. Zero joy derived. To spend all year listening and watching to this team win all these games by one run, only for all hope to be gnashed in eighteen innings, has just been the worst of the worst of all time.

Then I listened to the new Joyce Manor album, Cody, and I felt better. You should listen to it too.

There really isn’t a such thing as rock and roll anymore. There are just guitar and drum bands. They all get mashed into punk or emo or alternative or indy or whatever. This band is all of these things on one album and combines them to write some incredible tracks. Fake I.D. has a classic chorus that will probably give them more press simply by name dropping Kanye West than they have in their entire career. Eighteen boils life down simply and perfectly, “Just find something to do and then do it”. Do You Not Really Want to Get Better is a short conversation, not a song, that feeds perfectly into the next. Make Me Dumb is a never-ending onslaught of fast place Muse-ish guitar. Reversing Machine’s first line is perfect enunciation. Stairs is four minutes! And This Song is a Mess But So Am I ends before you want it to and leaves something else to be desired, just like everything else.

What’s even better is that as a collective they all work together to give this one unified feeling. I still can’t completely get there to describing it, but it makes me feel strange. As I’ve progressed little by little through this being an adult thing, it’s been rarer and rarer for records or sports or television or movies or books to make me feel anything at all. But this, this thing, through all the melodic thrash, minimalist lyrics that mean so much with so little, has just floored me. Joyce Manor is great. I think this album is the best.

Anyways, enjoy doing whatever it is that you do tonight. Talk about whatever you want here. Just remember the standard rules apply.