Tuesday 12/8: Attack Attack!—"All My Life"
Today, we share our thoughts on the return from the Ohio crabcore pioneers Attack Attack!.
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 the return from the Ohio crabcore pioneers Attack Attack!.
Attack Attack!—“All My life”
Eric Bennett:
It’s August of 2009, the tail-end of summer vacation between the end of Middle School and my Freshman year of High School, and I am walking around the park in my hometown late at night with my friends, Ashley and Kaelan. For us, Cobra Starship’s third album, Hot Mess, was the object of our obsession. You might remember this as the LP that spawned “Good Girls Go Bad”, their sole radio hit, and one of the only reminders that Leighton Meester made a solid attempt at a music career. We, however, remember it for album cuts like “Living in The Sky with Diamonds,” “Pete Wentz is the Only Reason We’re Famous”, and “You’re Not In On the Joke”. The latter was what played when you opened my MySpace profile for the better part of a year.
We discussed our favorite tracks and played them as loudly as our iPod Touch possibly could while we wandered through Dollar Stores, hung out on gazebos, or walked the bike trail on the outskirts of our sleepy Upstate hometown. Songs depicting a crazy, chaotic life, while we were making the most of stagnation. Vocalist Gabe Saporta sang about drinking and drugs while our vices included Mountain Dew voltage and Pixy Stix. The artists making up the soundtrack to this period of my life include Breathe Carolina, Owl City, Paramore, and 3OH!3, mostly living on today as signifiers, pillars of Hot Topic aesthetic, and the Fueled by Ramen roster. Around this same time, Attack Attack! was at their peak, and aimed at a constituency that, while encompassing many of my friends, did not include me. You could easily cut to Eli, two hours down the NYS thruway, loving them, while I was rolling my eyes, off-put by anything with that much screaming.
That said, much time has passed and my tastes have changed. I now love 100 gecs, a band undeniably indebted to the sound Attack Attack! were reviled for. As I listen back to them today, I see the appeal. Most of what I like in 100 gecs is present in “Stick Stickly.” and honestly, it doesn't make that much sense why I was okay with Breathe Carolina’s “Hello Fascination”, which was also equal parts sugar and screams, but scoffed at Attack Attack! doing something similar. While I don’t see myself falling too far down the rabbit hole, I can give it a solid amount of appreciation and contrition.
I see a separate kinship here as well. For fans of Cobra Starship, Hot Mess would be the peak, a moment where the pop half of pop-punk got shoved to the forefront but didn’t overwhelm. Their subsequent album, Night Shades, saw the envelope being pushed and falling loudly off the table. It’s too sleek, too radio-ready, and loses the slacker wit that made them charming. Listen to Attack Attack!’s new single, I have to imagine the fan reception is similar. “All My Life” is similarly too polished and feels far too much like cookie-cutter radio rock for a band meant to exist outside the box. Even its screamed chorus feels safe. This aspect of the performance could come from a slightly heavier-than-average Shinedown song as far as I’m concerned. The more electronic parts lose the dreaminess they once held in favor of cold, canned trap beats. I can’t see how they’d even market this on nostalgia, and that’s saying something. Nostalgia is powerful enough that as I write this I’m listening to Cobra Starship again, still convinced that it's great. I could go for a Mountain Dew right about now.
Eli Enis:
Eric’s trip down mmr lane presents a beautiful opportunity for some classic Endless Scroll harmony. If Eric did actually journey up the Erie Canal sometime in the 2009-2012 range, they would’ve found me not just joyfully bopping to Attack Attack! bangers like “The People’s Elbow” and “Sexual Man Chocolate” (the dubstep remix if I was feeling particularly frisky), but actively scoffing at all the shit they were listening to that was just one degree of separation from my wheelhouse. The Spider Man pointing meme, or what have you. Although I can look back on these acts now with a nostalgic fondness, I thought I was too metal to listen to Breathe Carolina, Cobra Starship, 3OH!3, and even their chaotic cousin Brokencyde when I was 15.
All of those acts were playing across the parking lot from my bands (A Day To Remember, Asking Alexandria) at Warped Tour, and their shirts were right next to each other on the big neon-colored shirt board at Hot Topic, but there was a noticeable divide between Eric’s cluster of trash-pop acts and my preferred cadre of trash-core acts. The difference came down to the direction of their influences: acts like Breathe Carolina were making pop music that took influence from metalcore, and Attack Attack! were making metalcore that took influence from pop. It’s funny how such a seemingly subtle variation in the ratio between screamed and sung can divide an entire market, but I can’t imagine a better way of portraying the fine-tipped yet significant differences between mine and Eric’s tastes than their teenage preference for Breathe Carolina and mine for Attack Attack!.
Sadly, this new Attack Attack! song doesn’t have the same effect for me. But in order to understand why the band’s first new song since 2012 sucks so much shit, you have to understand that Attack Attack! have been a completely different band with each album. And I don’t mean that in the Radiohead sense—they weren’t a group of chameleonic auteurs, they were just a gaggle of conflicting personalities who couldn’t keep a lineup together. The band who recorded their iconic Myspace hit “Stick Stickly” didn’t even exist when the album it was on, Someday Came Suddenly, actually saw a release. The screamer on the recorded version of that track was Austin Carlile, who quit the band shortly after to start one of the other metalcore titans of the time, Of Mice & Men (who became bigger than Attack Attack! ever were), and to carry out his side hustle as a serial rapist.
Anyways, once Carlile was out, the band was taken over by their keyboardist Caleb Shomo, who shifted AA! in slightly more refined direction on their 2010 S/T and then made them into self-serious losers on 2012’s This Means War, which had zero traces of the trance beats and glitzy auto-tune that made their early stuff so appealing and unique. The band unceremoniously broke up and Shomo started Beartooth, another band who’s now way more successful than Attack Attack! was at their height. Now, eight years later, original guitarist Andrew Whiting and OG drummer Andrew Wetzel have re-sparked the band with another new vocalist and completely switched up their sound to some awful variation of buttrock Linkin Park—with a couple generic metalcore breakdowns in there that offer some chum to the sharks.
“All My Life” sounds nothing like “Stick Stickly”-era AA!, nothing like “Sexual Man Chocolate”-era AA!, and not even like the slightly more hardcore-influenced This Means War-era AA!. You know how the American Pie movie franchise started making straight-to-DVD iterations of the show throughout the 2000’s that had none of the original cast members except for cameos from Eugene Levy? Attack Attack! are essentially the American Pie of metalcore, and we’re definitely living through The Naked Mile years right now. Do yourself a favor: don’t listen to this bullshit song, just go back and listen to “Stick Stickly” or, hell, give some Cobra Starship album tracks a try.