The Menzingers-On The Impossible Past
A collection of stories that drip with poignancy and sad truths, The Menzingers' third album is an intriguing and immersive record of soulful and emotive punk rock that draws you in through lyrics of regret, desperation and moving life-affirmation.
Frontmen Tom May and Greg Barnett share both vocals and lyrics and their dissection of the past pulls you in from the start. "Why all good things must fall apart" comes in the first song Good Things and hits like an arrow through the heart, such a simple line evoking a genuine and universal relatibility and sadness. The chorus of The Obituaries has a similar feel with its "I will fuck this up, I fucking know it", its connotations of heartbreaking inevitability even raising a wry smile in their self-knowingness. The vocalists' stop-starting, often Americana-esque, guitars feel authentic as they accompany the important stories being told, reminding one of The Gaslight Anthem's classic The '59 Sound with their honesty and retrospect. Eric Keen and Joe Godino keep rhythm wonderfully as the forgotten street-side images of Gates pass by and May and Barnett's dual-vocals on Burn After Writing powerfully reminiscent of great times past. As the album progresses the images and characters we learn about become even more melancholy, Sun Hotel's "I think this corner may be the loneliest corner in the whole world" representing this perfectly.
But importantly the almost forgotten memories of "sharing smokes" and playing "mexican guitars" are still there and through basking in their glorious affiliations with better times the album is given a subtle sense of light and the fact that we're "running out of time" suggests we should live life to the full and use the warmth of the past as our fire rather than a safe place to run and hide. This is expressed perhaps most beautifully on Casey as May believes that the lost "Casey still dance[s] inside of [him]" especially in his bets that he "sounds like a broken record every time [he] opens his mouth", it's the belief that although everything comes to an end nothing has to die and this makes for an uplifting and special listen.
This is an album that moves and breaks hearts in equal measure and demands you to lose yourself in its words, stories and truths that we may or may not have realised about life yet.