I’ve been battling an addiction to emotional punk rock (“emo,” if you will) for almost four years now. It’s been a hard fought battle, but I think I’ve overcome the worst of it. I’ve traded The Get Up Kids for Guided by voices; Saves The Day for Superchunk. The emo-kid inside me has grown up, moved to an expensive downtown loft apartment and rarely calls me unless he needs money for rent. I swore I’d never let emo get the best of me again.
That is, until this past week.
After listening to Matchbook Romance’s latest release at least eight times, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve fallen off the wagon.
Context is what makes “Voices,” due in stores on Feb. 14, such an exciting album. These aren’t songs tailored for a dance floor or even a keg party. The minor chord meltdowns and break-neck tempos that fuel each track are there to set the mosh pit ablaze.
Matchbook’s combination of anguished vocals and metal influenced drum and guitar heroics has always been the bands strongest suit, but what they’ve failed at in the past is consistency. The spotty mixture of screamo anthems and campfire ballads on their previous album, “Stories and Alibis,” made the listener wish they would just pick one genre and stick with it.
On “Voices”, it’s clear they’d rather have you pumping your fist to all the metal glory that’s displayed on each of the 11 tracks of this album. The multi-tracked vocals and intense guitar solos are a headbangers dream – that can’t be an accident.
Being the cynic that I am, I found myself waiting to be let down by sappy sing-alongs haphazardly thrown in the mix like on their previous album. On “You Can Run, But We’ll Find You,” the album is opened with a lilting piano dirge that I immediately equated with the beginning of the end. Fortunately, from that point on, the album climbs upward in both intensity and tempo. By the time the track “My Mannequin Can Dance” rolls around, “Voices” makes it almost impossible to sit still.
“Monsters,” the fifth track and first single off the album, starts out with a strange mix of instrumentation: Hand claps and a guitar riff that’s made to sound like an organ grinder. It seems kitschy at first, but by the time the chorus kicks in, it becomes clear that the “Hey! Hey’s!” woven into the chorus will make this song a centerpiece of Matchbook Romance’s live show.
By the end of the ninth track, one will start to wonder if the band is running out of breath, which is immediately confirmed by “What a Sight,” the first sign that some of their old heart-on-their-sleeve tendencies are still in tact. The track serves as the album’s default shiny heartfelt ballad, but it still sounds much angrier than any of the band’s previous songs that are in a similar vein. This is probably the point in the show where all the guys grab their girlfriends – or whatever girl that lent them a pair of jeans for the evening – and sway back and forth peacefully, waiting for all hell to break loose.
Although the album’s lasting impact on music is questionable, it definitely rocks. It also came along at exactly the right time; the pseudo-intellectual noodling of the latest Thrice album was a total bummer to the Hot Topic crowd, and who knows when Brand New will leave the Alabama bunker they’ve been holed up in for most of last year. Until something slightly better graces the world of aggressive rock music for the masses, “Voices” fills the void perfectly.
