Review Summary: The worthless case has closed, and Like Pacific is better for it.
Like Pacific's
In Spite of Me doesn't find solace with closure. No, screw that. Senseless feelings matter just as much as one's reasonable ones.
And ignoring this opening couplet, the album ignores the feelings of others. It decides now to abandon empathy and bask in its vitriolic immaturity. Finally, the band admits sentimental crap goes nowhere.
The lyrics occupy a struggle of mine a while back, first discovering them: rough breakup, a bit pissed and lonely. It wasn't about me or her and rather just the scenes we ended up in, diverging at a dumb crossroads we didn't have the experience to navigate. Jordan Black screams lines I desperately would've wanted to nod along to. "If it's you, not me, then why do I feel so self-defeated," he questions, disturbing the soft affirmations that someone must've given him. "You never think of me, but when you do, I hope you break down steadily," he grits, slamming out words with an exquisite finality.
In writing, the tracks follow the pop punk formula, but no one has concocted the best version of the mixture this year--yet. This comes as close as I've seen.
The best
Distant Like You Asked reflects a mirror image of this album. Sometimes, Like Pacific loses itself in shouting, letting the rest of the song fall apart with them, making them boring enough to fall asleep with. Now, they manage to slap themselves awake and maintain control, using aggression to emphasize some of their best lines. Lyrically, the band uses enough good material to sustain an interesting half-hour about breakups, the topic that the genre centers itself upon. That seems impressive enough to applaud.
"Useless, nervous, but tasteful, whatever happened to graceful, judgment, patience," he prods, hoping that he can find his ex-lover, perhaps even an old friend, in some void, maybe his dreams. Yeah, nobody tells you, but people, the ones you base your life on, swap their good traits for bad ones over time. That forces one to move on and improve yourself, fortify the inner workings in order to expunge the attributes now surfacing to the orbit of perception.
The worthless case has closed, and Like Pacific is better for it.
