Tuesday 1/12: Joyce Manor—"Beach Community"

Today, we share our thoughts on a standout track from Joyce Manor’s S/T pillar of the emo revival, which turned ten years old yesterday.

Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him) and Eric Bennett (they/them). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. Now we’re, also a M-F newsletter about songs. Our format is simple: a link to a song and a short take from each of us about what we think of it. Each day of the week has a corresponding genre: Monday is indie, Tuesday is punk, Wednesday is hip-hop, Thursday is pop, and Friday is misc.

Today, we share our thoughts on a standout track from Joyce Manor’s S/T pillar of the emo revival, which turned ten years old yesterday.

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Joyce Manor—"Beach Community"

Eric Bennett:

Joyce Manor is one of those bands that I didn’t really expect to like as much as I do. The summer Never Hungover Again came out, I was 18 and between high school and college, spending a lot of time at home while my family was at work. I listened to it while folding laundry and cleaning so my mom wouldn't have to when she came home. I listened to it on long walks when the emptiness of my house got too crazy-making. It was 13 minutes of music I immediately clicked with, so I dug further into Joyce Manor. I wasn’t sold on the self-titled record as immediately. I liked “Constant Headache” and “Orange Julius”, but for the most part I was pretty cold on the whole thing. The one song I loved was “Beach Community.”

 I love that I have no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. I love that, though almost every JM song has this, Barry Johson’s voice is so heavily filtered that he sounds almost robotic. His delivery here is strange and endearing to me. I love a lot of things about “Beach Community,” but my favorite is without question its melody. It chugs along, and remains consistent, while unraveling, and becoming something overpowering as more and more instrumentation gets thrown over top of it. What starts as a steady, swaying thing becomes a complete torrent of sound. While Never Hungover Again is my Joyce Manor record of choice, far and away my favorite moment of their discography is the final few refrains of “Beach Community”: “A few miles down / as the streets count backwards / I realize it’s true / everything reminds me of you”

Eli Enis:

When this record came out I was too invested in clean, crisp, stage-diveable pop-punk—the kind this band was notoriously against—to get it. Obviously my relationship with this type of music changed as I got older, and now, like Eric, I’d consider “Beach Community” to be one of my favorite emo songs of the 2010s and one of the best Joyce Manor bangers. That last line is great because it’s so universally visceral: everyone goes through at least one phase when everything you see reminds you of someone else, and since the context is muddy it’s a fill-in-the-blank for angsters of all age.

Another passage I love is the truly ferocious and comically cruel verse when Johnson blathers with a punch-drunk sloppiness, “Wait for your cue, 'cause my scene it ain't over / Torch up your house while your kids are at home.” That’s just the perfect handshake between early 2000s Long Island pop-punk sass and, well, early 2000s Long Island pop-punk viciousness. But in the very next line Johnson sounds like he dropped from the top of the world to below a highway underpass, his voice softening as he cries, “What can you do when you're not getting sober? / It's hard to admit but you're always feeling alone.” It’s so self-involved, so over-the-top, so desperate, and so goddamn accurate to the teenage emotional experience. Or, you know, the rose-tinted nostalgia of the teenage experience. No one does it better.