Review Summary: "Remember having good times / Remember having best friends"
Good times with friends. Brews with the boys and sex with the girl next door. Sometimes it’s easy to focus the negativity of music, the fact that most of it is written under times of duress and hard times. This makes it all the more refreshing when you find bands that can take you back to easier times, the moments where, yeah, your life could be sh
itty and messed up, but at the moment none of that matters. St. Louis hardcore act, Better Days, is an embodiment of taking all the bad moments of life and putting them on hold. Similar to fellow acts Paint it Black and Shook Ones, Better Days isn’t necessarily pushing the envelope when it comes to melodic hardcore, but is essentially a throwback to the band’s name, better days. Their sonic formula is nothing inventive and has been done plenty of times before, by much better bands as well, but there is a unprecedented level of honesty found on
Songs About Drinking. The album cover and album name itself is a throwback that has been done over and over, yet the fact that Better Days is so blatantly honest in their approach to positive hardcore makes it that much more of an album to love. Songs like ‘Stay Calm’ belts out uplifting anthems such as “
Fight when you have to, walk when you can / Don’t act in anger or you’re going to lose again”. Heavily counter to the ethos of ‘stand up and fight!’ Better Days shows a surprising amount of depth from an EP that seems overly shallow in nature.
“
Forget yesterday’s mistakes and start working on tomorrow / Life is too short to dwell in pain and sorrow”
You won’t find too much in terms of originality in
Songs About Drinking. But here’s what you will get; blunt honesty, a fun time, and throwback songs from a time where hardcore was about living life to its fullest, not about the negativity. Better Days does their formula of music in such a way that it brings back the nostalgia of house parties, cow-tipping, and chill times when the only people who had your back where your friends. Not precisely juvenile in nature, as Better Days have more depth than that, but exactly what their name says, a time of better days.
