Week of 8/11: Japanese Breakfast, The Menzingers, The Promise Ring, Death Cab for Cutie
It's Miranda's birthday, so the rest of us wrote about songs that Miranda loves. Aren't we cute? Also, Miranda says happy birthday to Ben Gibbard. How generous of her.
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him), Eric Bennett (they/them), Michael Brooks (he/him) and Miranda Reinert (she/her). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. On Substack, we’re also a weekly roundup of songs. Our format is simple: each of our four hosts picks a song they love and writes about it. There will be one free post every week, and more at the end of every month for paid subscribers. For the sake of your wallet, don’t start a paid subscription on Substack. Instead, sign up at the 2$ tier or higher on Patreon and we will gift you a subscription.
Japanese Breakfast - “12 Steps”
Eric Bennett:
This year has only further proved that there isn't anyone else in indie rock who’s like Michelle Zauner. Between the massive success of her memoir Crying in H Mart, and her latest album as Japanese Breakfast, Jubilee, she seems to be thriving in all aspects of her career. One of the many heartwarming stories in her memoir is her recollection of the first time she met the man who would be her husband. The story is also one of a handful of nods to her music. It only makes sense to include these; music has been such a part of her life but is also a large reason some segment of the readership is there at all. In that passage, listeners can immediately clock that she's talking about the events behind “12 Steps.”
The track sits nicely on the back half of her 2017 album Soft Sounds From Another Planet, and patiently propels itself as Zauner uses vivid, fire-filled language to describe the immediate passion she felt that day, and how it hasn't gone out. The searing guitar solo following the first chorus is one of two breakdowns on the song that feel quintessentially Japanese Breakfast. The other is the song's bridge, where each rings out with emotion and the infectious pop undertones peek out from behind the shiny guitar. Both moments are so full of melody that they bounce around inside your skull, but harsh enough that you feel something. “12 Steps” is short, just over two and a half minutes, but packs just as much of a punch as Zauner’s more expansive creations. It deserves to burn brightly like this, it only mirrors the fire within it this way.
The Menzingers - “Nice Things”
Eli Enis:
It’s hard to think of a more depressing band to listen to on one’s birthday, so I imagine that Miranda will be bumping this shit loud and proud later this evening. At their best, The Menzingers make jaunty punk anthems for getting wasted and screaming along until you realize the stinging relatability of the words you’re singing, at which point you might even start crying. I famously don’t cry, but The Menzingers are a band who always get me damn-near close to welling up, especially their sickeningly earnest, nostalgia-drunk, and downright brilliant collection of PBR poetry, On the Impossible Past.
Our latest episode of the podcast included another installment of our frequent tangent — and a personal pet-peeve of Miranda’s — which is that anniversary-pegged retrospective music journalism is often lazy and unnecessary, but can be the best genre of writing when it’s done right. I don’t know if OTIP truly deserves essay-length praise for its 10th birthday next year, mostly because it’s an album that sounds like it’s been around for 10 years since it came out. It’s old-soul punk for a generation who might not even be granted the economic and/or environmental opportunity to peacefully become old and yearn for the good ole days, because our bright, youthful optimism was already stripped from us by virtue of having to confront the bleak existential realization that the world is dying and we’ll likely be there to see it.
Something about The Menzingers’ quaint wistfulness for punk houses and hometown friends, beer-battered nights and anxious mornings feels both as relevant as it did in 2012 and strangely outdated. All good things should fall apart, after all. By the way, happy birthday, Miranda! Anyways, “Nice Things” is one of my favorite songs from OTIP, and I think it’s the one that feels most lyrically apt in 2021.
“The western walls are closing in / Are you happy, sane, are you rich, are you thin?/ Dreaming their dreams? Singing songs of another time? / Is your gold so strangely acquired? / Has your name become known and desired? / Have you degenerated? Are you running out of time?” The chorus replies by asking and then answering its own question, “Do you want nice things? Sure you do.” I always loved the non-specificity of that line — and others on the record, like, “I will fuck this up, I fucking know it,” which serve as a open-to-interpretation foils to the songwriters’ granular memories, quite literally creating space for their fans within their own memoirs.
The “nice things” He’s talking about are material objects, and it’s a line that’s popped in my head often throughout the last six months as I prepared to and then actually did move in with my girlfriend, which required me to acquire a shit-ton of “nice” furnishings that made me feel safe and content but were also splashed with a certain dark irony by the apocalyptic backdrop (a raging plague, devastating wildfires, an economy in tatters) of my mid-20-something American middle-class milestone. “Climb the wall, before the fall,” is the final line of “Nice Things” and it’s repeated over and over like an instruction. That’s the part that’s aged the worst. There is no wall left to climb. And the grass isn’t green on the other side, it burnt out last year from drought and never grew back. It’s a fun song, though. Definitely a fun song.
The Promise Ring - “Red & Blue Jeans”
Michael Brooks:
I couldn’t imagine trying to celebrate twenty-four years of my dear friend Miranda without mentioning The Promise Ring at least once. As a part of her ongoing quest to get me into emo music (I think the end goal is both of us getting into Jimmy Eat World) Miranda suggested that I check out Nothing Feels Good by The Promise Ring and I’m really glad that she did. There’s something about the urgency of a song like “Red & Blue Jeans” that I’m always searching for as a listener, I just never knew where to get it from. If I would have known that you could get this kind of catharsis from 90’s emo when I was a teenager I would probably be living in the American Football house right now, so maybe it’s for the best that I didn’t discover this stuff until much later in life.
Part of what makes “Red & Blue Jeans” such a satisfying experience as a listener are the ways in which it revels in its own simplicity. Almost right away the song locks into a groove which it cannot shake away from, the same three chords repeated in different variations for nearly three minutes. There’s not even really all that many lyrics in this song either, “doo-doo” is possibly the most affecting vocal performance in this entire song. But this song wouldn’t really hit the same if The Promise Ring were more into guitar noodling like Cap’n Jazz or if they had a little more bite to them like Jawbreaker or something. During its most infectious moments there’s nothing else out there quite like Nothing Feels Good, a nearly perfect record that made me realize maybe I am kind of emo, and a necessary stepping stone toward Miranda and I appreciating Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity in all its glory.
Death Cab for Cutie - “Stability”
Miranda Reinert:
While my friends write about music I love, I’m going to write about Death Cab for Cutie as today is also Ben Gibbard’s birthday. Ben is a man who has given us so much and I could talk about lots of songs I love, but today we talk about a track I find fascinating.
To me, Death Cab is such a fully formed band with defined eras that the decision to end Plans with a song that appeared on a bonus track edition of an older album feels bizarre. “Stability” appears on an EP of the same name as an over 12 minute long track. Its Plans counterpart, “Stable Song,” is essentially unchanged apart from chopping off 8 and a half minutes of sparse instrumentation and a distant reiteration of the chorus. The older version of the song still builds, but in a less polished form. “Stability” sounds like Photo Album in its production. Plans has none of the roughness and I think that’s generally to its benefit. A song like “Marching Bands of Manhattan” or “Crooked Teeth” would never reach the heights they do without the hyper clarity of Ben’s voice or ultra slick production they took on.
But I think “Stability” feels more authentically intimate than anything on Plans and i love it for that reason. Happy birthday to Ben Gibbard and also me.