The band have expressed the hope that their songs will help others.
But you suspect the band’s heart lies with the songs that deal with a more earnest brand of relatability, depicting anxiety and self-doubt in terms that range from potent – as on TMI – to inspirational poster-ready: “Flowers only bloom if you get through the rain,” Victoria offers on Rocket Science. Many songs come equipped with sharp, funny lines: “I wiped all my pictures off my phone, I forgot the smell of your cologne – thank God, I kind of hated it,” snaps Victoria on It’s Over for Me. The lyrics are at their best when applying bratty angst – which has been part of pop-punk ever since the Descendents posed the eternal question “Parents – why won’t they shut up?” – to affairs of the heart. Melodies soar in a manner that shows off Victoria’s powerful voice: she is particularly good at drawing out notes for bars and bars. Most are over and done in less than three minutes on many tracks, chugging, muted guitars burst into power chords when the chorus hits. The songs here are compact, fat-free and decked out with production touches – including an unexpected burst of Daft Punk-ish filtering on Kool – that never overwhelm them or sound gimmicky. The record company cash that has been lavished on Past//Present//Future clearly hasn’t gone unnoticed: its first lyric finds vocalist Edith Victoria decrying accusations that the band are an industry plant.īut it’s tempting to suggest that they got their money’s worth. Meet Me the Altar picked John Fields as Past Present Future’s producer specifically because he’d worked with the Jonas Brothers, whose early albums stretched the definition of pop-punk to the point where “punk” became a very moot descriptor indeed.įields joins a supporting team of big-hitters that also includes regular One Direction songwriter John Ryan and former Semisonic frontman Dan Wilson, who went on to co-write Adele’s Someone Like You.
The band clearly grew up during pop-punk’s early-00s Disneyfication, an era that saw Lindsay Lohan’s character in the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday front a band called Pink Slip. Their debut album, Past//Present//Future, features scratching effects on opener Say It (To My Face) and a tendency, during faster songs, to drop into half-speed tempos that carry nu-metal’s lumbering gait. Meanwhile, the sound of Meet Me the Altar – a trio of Florida-based early twentysomethings described as “the saviours of pop-punk” by the New York Times, and the first band made up of women of colour to be signed by august emo label Fueled By Ramen – speaks loudly of childhoods spent watching Paramore and Fall Out Boy ascend to platinum sales.
0 kommentar(er)
