Author: DC
Word count: 700
The modern musical world is all about perfection. Sonically, singers, bands and engineers have fallen in love with advanced studio technology and are using it to create evermore polished and note-perfect songs, and we are buying them. The charts have become dominated by songs that are as immaculately arranged and styled as Mitt Romney’s hairdo – and that’s not always a bad thing. Some bands have used Pro Tools tweaks and cutting-edge systems to create sounds that are new and exciting, and that push what bands are capable of compositionally to new levels (if further proof of this is needed, listen to the new Foals and Ratatat records).
In terms of the personalities of our pop artists, things have for the most part gone the same way. Many of our chart starts have been moulded into perfect, airbrushed human beings who seemingly feel only the purest of human emotions, the Disney take on life. Or they have gone the other way, albeit to another extreme of perfection – people who want to be seen as edgy or dangerous can’t just be flawed, they have to be perfectly imperfect. They can’t just be freaks but have to be superfreaks, they need to position themselves as girls so far off the rails that they’ve replaced their Colgate with Jack Daniels, or guys so corrupting that they can instantly make even the good girls go bad. It’s not really acceptable to just be human anymore, you have to be a Greek ideal of virginal, chaste behaviour or a Keith Richards harbinger of chaos.
As a result of this Heidi Montag airbrushing approach to humanity, it sometimes feels like there isn’t much in modern pop and rock for many of us to relate to. Most of us aren’t angels but we’re certainly not Slash either, we’re neither squeaky-Bieber-clean nor Ke$ha-disinfectant-dirty. WE get many things right and we fuck some things up, we mostly have good intentions but are sometimes vindictive, and we hope that our 20 minutes on the treadmill today will cancel out the beers and a slice that we wolfed down last night.
I think that this is why I haven’t been able to stop listening to Chamberlain Waits, the new album by The Menzingers, since my friend Dusty recommended it to me. There isn’t even a touch of the robot, of the studio polish, about this record. From start to finish it is 100% heart and 100% human, for all that entails. The protagonists of The Menzingers’ lyrics fall somewhere between angels and devils – they argue, fiercely, but out of belief and conviction rather than spite. Their arguments are frequently trivial but that doesn’t make them any less vital or worth waging; after all, what’s more important to argue about than music and bands (“we argued over which Bad Religion album was better / I thought No Control or Suffer”). They want to get things right (“Maybe one day I’ll mend your wounds / maybe then I can mend mine too”) but know that, like everyone else, they’ll have to overcome their self-destructive streak first before that will even be a possibility (“I’m gonna get me fighting fit / I’m gonna let my liver play offense”).
This sense of failure and aspiration extends to the way in which The Menzingers have crafted their record. One of the two singers that they band employs is sometimes struggling so hard to find the right key that even Auto-Tune couldn’t help him, but it doesn’t matter, it’s somehow masked by the way that he half-yelps his words, making the belief worth more than pitch-perfection. The other vocalist has a sweeter singing voice – but can’t force himself to sing perk-pop, instead choosing to brutally assess his own shortcomings via three-minute punk jams. The guitars twitch and roar and fuzz, the drums clatter and bathe the whole recording in cymbal-splash… and the whole thing is just so perfectly imperfect. The lack of smooth edges, the unwillingness of the band to use all of the technology that they can afford to buff their songs to a 21st century sheen, is what makes Chamberlain Waits quite so wonderful. It’s the anti-Montag, and for that we should all be very grateful.
