Review Summary: nostalgia ultra
Nostalgia is an emotion that is inherently melancholic. To yearn so helplessly for the past must mean, by some comparison, that you’ve become discontent with the present. It’s a feeling that has been stripped naked and fetishized by the pseudo-depth of tumblr culture along with my precious, Portuguese, “Saudade.” This fetishized nostalgia is also completely flawed. We like to glorify our personal pasts. We tend to wear our rose colored glasses to sleep and the past we so often imagine is nothing more than a dream. Our pasts were never perfect even if we consider them to be.
The Menzingers', On the Impossible Past, intrenches itself in this personal nostalgia and the impossibility of the past that we find ourselves mulling over before we shut our eyes and sleep at night. Rather than reminiscing on the good ol’ days of east coast americana, they take a long look into the recesses of their freudian subconsciousness and shovel through their suppressed failures with a rusty spade.
The band challenges the fetishization of a perfect nostalgia with a narrator whose lonely memory is “cursed with picture perfect imagery.” When looked back upon with clear eyes the past is never pretty. The past is just guitar, bass, drums, and the crackling voice of a pack a day thirty-something. The past isn’t an american muscle car. The past is that car crashing. The past isn’t just sex and good times. It’s lost love and dead friends.
On the Impossible Past embodies the transportive qualities of nostalgia. It grips you by the handles of your brain and physically pulls you headfirst into it’s narrative. A reminiscing mind is a viewfinder that scrolls through a series of faded snapshots, and this record animates those pictures into moving vignettes. I found myself the character in several of these acts. I found myself, telling myself, “I will *** this up. I ***ing know it,” and I’m sure, at one point, I have ***ed it up. I found myself falling for a waitress because we both smoked the same cigarettes. Being “seated as diners and lovers,” then “getting the check as friends for the better,” because I’m sure I have.
There are songs on this record that are written about me. Just as I'm sure there are songs on this record that are written about you. This album is able to take the deeply personal and transform it into a tangible, universal matter. Our nostalgia could never be perfect because it is so deeply human. This album takes those imperfections and lays them out like a timeline. We tend to reminisce on our successes but this album highlights our downfalls and our shortcomings. It’s an album that exposes the gaps in our impossibly perfect pasts and puts a magnifying glass to each old, familiar failure. With their timeless punk sound The Menzingers create a perfect nostalgia, flaws and all, without ever taking a step back towards the past.
