CD of The Week

Throughout their career, Philly’s The Menzingers have found themselves pondering the past while struggling with the future, somehow avoiding the present. In their latest release, Everything I Ever Saw, the aging punks plant themselves firmly in the here and now. Reflecting on different experiences in the same time, we see how they’ve matured musically and personally.

Produced by Will Yip (Turnstile, The Wonder Years, Queen of Jeans), Everything I Ever Saw manages to be the band’s most explosive foray, adding new elements to their signature sound. Piano, synth, and horns accompany the pop-rock we’ve come to enjoy from the quartet. “The Fool” opens with a declarative trumpet melody before we get a crunchy guitar and drum combo as co-frontman Tom May belts out “I only like the beginning of things” before continuing on to a classic May-Menzos ear worm of a chorus, eventually throwing us gut-punch lyrics like “I’m a dreamer, I’m a believer, self-deceiver, I ain’t no keeper” and “I’ll be drinking till the sun explodes.” Piano melodies appear in “Romanticism” and “Gasoline & Matches,” and we hear a synth intro to the anthem, “Nobody’s Heroes.”

The album is brutally honest about where May and his co-frontman, Greg Barnett, currently find themselves in their lives. In the last few years, Barnett got married and welcomed his first child into the world. “Chance Encounters” opens the album, a driving force of an opener that catapults the album with the same style of straightforward rock akin to After the Party. Barnett croons, “We may never stand a chance, but we still got to try,” and later sings of chalking it up to “fate or whatever,” a higher power, and stars aligning - all from a chance encounter. It continues in other tracks of his on the album, most notably “Romanticism” (“Ooh, she’s the only love of my only life and I have never thought twice”) and “When She Enters My Dreams” (“And we meet ourselves in the eyes of one another, seeing everything that we have ever felt”).

Conversely, May recently saw his marriage end in divorce in the same timeframe. Rather than shying away with the occasional allusion to it, May bares it all throughout the record. In “Breathe With Me,” he laments what once was with another gut punch of “God knows we tried, we cried, we screamed into the sky. It’s not enough, it’s all fucked up, I’m a bleeding memory.” He continues in “Parade Day,” starting with a haunting “I miss you in the morning, I speak to you at night. I can’t wait forever, but I’m damned if I don’t try,” continuing with a painful realization that it’s over and longing to hold onto the memory.

It all culminates in the album’s closer/title track, an all-out hopeful lamentation of what it is to be human. “Born with a bad memory, what a fatal flaw,” it begins, as Barnett continues singing of taking the good with the bad and happy with the sad, and repairing a broken heart. It ends with a repeating chorus, “I don’t want to relive, I just want to remember everything I saw.”

In the spirit of full transparency, initial listens of the album didn’t evoke much emotion. However, deeper subsequent listens allowed the layers of the onion to peel back, and much like an onion, tears began to swell. The emotion is there - sometimes on the band’s sleeve and other times buried in literary metaphors - but the discovery helped drive the message home. The dichotomy of life is on true display and shows how different the human experience and condition can be in the same amount of time. While one person celebrates, another hurts, but in the end, it strengthens our connections as we face it head-on.

The Menzingers play a hometown show at The Fillmore on November 20th.

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