Review Summary: glorified nothingness.
Adolescence is such a vastly changing field of experience. With certain kids being thrown out into the real world as young as 13 due to bad financial stability, or on the other hand you have people clocking in at 35 who can’t give up their one bedroom apartment and video games enough to grow up. There’s a certain niche that accompanies the middle of this spectrum that I think we all can relate to just a bit whether we’re fully understanding of it or not. I really do think we can all connect with nostalgia and relate to the ache of growing up and learning to get over it. I mean, why else would acts like Blink-182 and Jeff Rosenstock continue to trudge forward far into the 2010’s and almost 2020’s? Because we can all still relate to the melodramatic bullshit and the ignorance that we encounter in some way just to come to terms with it. That’s where The Obsessives subtly affirmed
Heck No Nancy fits in; it’s so tethered to the middle and clinged to the spectrum’s centerfold that it shouldn’t work at all, but that’s
exactly what makes it work so cleverly.
“Daisy” kicks off the record with the elongated clean guitars as the noname-ridden vocals kick in to describe another story about a girl. The magic kicks and explodes and you’re left waiting. It all escapes you and you’re left thinking about what you could be. The story rings unoriginal, surely, and what’s another emo revival song about a girl? Well when the energy is so unassuming and so undemanding, you can’t help but slowly embrace it with open arms, as the guitar tones grab you from the back and the odd-timed drums turn your head into ears and shoulder by the time “Nodding Off” has destroyed you as a listener. There’s nothing really beautiful or genius about
Heck No Nancy, hell i’m certain this will just relay as another generic sad adolescent tale of melodrama a la Dad Thighs or Remo Drive but there’s a certain absence of optimism in The Obsessives’ sound. The cymbals still ring similarly, the chords aren’t as varied as they could be, but the honesty and raw unadulterated drone that overtakes this record like a silent chokehold separates this record from its contemporaries in not necessarily a blaze of glory, like a kid lighting a cigarette in a room already unhealthily filled with smoke.
The tale that even lies in
Heck No Nancy is not one that necessarily omnipresent. The album acts more of a representation of its themes and messages, without actually directly conveying those messages, essentially as a glorified nothingness. But the thing is there’s not many albums that gracefully past forward this idea to the point where it almost feels like it doesn’t even know it moved past it. The album maintains quite the confidently somber and serious tone yet with music and an album title that clearly and youthfully act as a counterpart comedically that works in context to the album indefinitely. It’s not about being the next great big portrayal of intricately presented naturalistic impressions of our universe. It’s too busy in the back shotgunning beers and laughing at just the linguistics of that sequence of words in the first place. It’s making fun of the world whereas all the other albums of its kind are still caught up in the memories of getting stoned listening to The Smiths with that girl in high school or whatever.
Heck No Nancy is an album that’s so unapologetically familiar with its world yet so unknowingly dissociated from it, that it makes fun of itself in such a way that actually makes itself appealing. It’s content with being a joke as it is with being nothing at all and that’s what make the overall portrayal of ingenious adolescence laid out here on
Heck No Nancy so easy to embrace as it is to despise.
