Review Summary: Bleachers lose the plot.
One of the bigger headlines for the year so far has been about plagiarism in the online content creation sphere. The less you know about the particulars, the better, but it’s nonetheless a conversation that is necessary as not only online tools because more readily available, but artificial ones as well. The advent of Tik Tok and even shorter forms of media have taken the already fractured and stratified decay of our monoculture to extremes, as people debate the merits of Clean Goth aesthetics being a thing, when it’s really just owning a black Stanley cup and listening to The Cure. While the endless debates and discourse only continue to get louder and more recursive, the blueprint was more or less drawn up a few years back when Greta Van Fleet arrived out of nowhere to insist that they somehow accidentally tripped and fell and totally accidentally wrote
Led Zeppelin IV. Hell, they actually were inspired by Rush. Total coincidence. That didn’t stop the band from garnering a fanbase that was all too eager to comment “it’s nice to see kids are still making REAL music” on YouTube rips, because more of the same is good enough for some folks, artistic ambition be damned. Would it have made a difference if Robert Plant gave them the thumb’s up in his old age?
That push-pull question of copy-tribute has curiously become the conundrum around Jack Antonoff’s Bleachers project. What began as shockingly resonant pop-rock that managed to marry a rock pastiche of yesteryear with the washed out Tumblr aesthetic of the second Obama administration has become little more than that Chris Farley SNL sketch wherein he asks Paul McCartney if he remembers a bunch of the most famous events of his storied career, reinforcing them with a “that’s awesome.” Instead of Paul, it is Bruce Springsteen who is the object of his affection. On 2021’s
Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night, the question was Bruce’s
The River; on
Bleachers, …it’s still
The River, but with a splattering of
Tunnel of Love. The former Bleachers album, while still cloaked in shadows of the past, still skirted by thanks to an infectious energy that may have stemmed from The Boss himself stopping by for an appearance. You could practically hear the jubilation of Jack thumbing through his rolodex to call him up, along with other names like Annie Clark, Lana Del Rey, and The Chicks -the little guy from Jersey finally made it!
Bleachers, then, is once more, without feeling. The tempos are slower and the self-mythologizing is louder. This is the self-titled, you see, and only serious, grand-sweeping statements will do: “I think it was the day that Kobe fell from the sky/Or the day that Kendall Pepsi-smiled,” Jack wonders aloud on “Self Respect” to absolutely no one. He hopes against hope to become a bright and shining star like a teen in a made-for-Netflix movie to “make it Bleachers” in “Jesus is Dead". Elsewhere, he baits a popsicle stick joke with “Bodycam, only flams/Bleachers band, only flams” on one of the album’s only highlights, “Modern Girl”. To wit, he continues the YA protagonist yearning with, “I guess I’m New Jersey’s finest New Yorker.” You would never know that Lana Del Rey dropped a career-defining album last year when she stops by to duet a tired Balenciaga reference on “Alma Mater.” There’s a few callouts -by name too!- for his bandmates to work in tandem with his “aw, shucks” Jersey Boy schtick just in case you were worried that Jack didn’t understand the assignment.
Mind you,
Bleachers is rarely bad in a functional sense. Despite the lack of personality, it is shined to a sheen and can occasionally eek out a gesture at why this aping would’ve been so compelling to conduct in the first place. The aforementioned “Modern Girl” is about as close to, ugh,
Old Bleachers as we’re gonna get and “Tiny Moves” at least does an admirable job of getting that E Street Band swing. While it may not turn Jack into The Boss, it can at least make him The Interim Supervisor. Hell, “Call Me After Midnight” is a bit of a left turn delight with its delicate, water level synths that turns a discarded Brockhampton demo into one of the more enjoyable The 1975 songs.
It’s in the word salad of name-dropping necessary to truly comprehend the current state of Bleachers that we arrive at the heart of the problem. A self-titled album is usually meant to be a statement that most accurately reflects the mission statement of a band. The circle is a lot easier to square when it’s a band’s debut and every inch is a new pioneer; four albums in and it better be a damn good clarification. Sadly,
Bleachers ends up being all the worst fears of Jack’s career path made manifest, as any semblance of uniqueness is sanded down in favor of Christmas Special-quality cameos to remind you just how strong his LinkedIn profile has grown. Ella endorsed him for clapping; Taylor for referencing love as a wire. When he sang “I wanna get better” ten years ago on the heels of fun.’s imperialistic grip on the pop landscape, I was captivated as to what that could mean and who he could be. A decade later on his band’s titular project, Jack makes it clear that he just wants to be Austin Butler playing Bruce Springsteen.
