Review Summary: A sibilate spew of witty, intelligent, and gritty punk rock which rises above the popularity-minded doldrums of the '90s-era pseudo-punk acts.
I can remember the widespread appeal of pseudo-punk bands like Green Day and The Offspring back during high school, but I also recall my distinct unwillingness to ever really get into them, and looking back on it I suppose it was because I felt their sound was a bit too pop, a bit too mindful of the mainstream trends, a bit too concerned with being played and not just playing. Listening to Say Anything’s
…Is a Real Boy for the first time, I discovered the things which I felt those previous bands had missed in much of their works: an ironic self-awareness of the genre and the mainstream pressures upon it; brooding emotion which calls forth the greatest hits of punk’s earliest forbears and their permeating anti-establishment message; and of course the manic fervor exhibited in the shifting tempos and the gruff, spitting vocals.
I use “manic” here for a dual reason: to denote the energy of Say Anything’s music, an energy reminiscent of punk’s original bands and something which punk revival has seemed to have forgotten (until now, it would seem), and also as a reference to frontman Max Bemis’ bipolar disorder, which may be one of the primary sources of that energy (and which has provided the band with plenty of problems, yet they still endure), and is certainly a partial reason for the band’s candidly emotive appeal.
…Is a Real Boy is not as concise or straightforward with its punk styles, though, as most of the songs do last at least three minutes, while the album’s longest exceeds six. So, perhaps the style can be more precisely qualified as pop-punk, but it is a pop-punk which transcends its peers, in many ways. Yet the most glaring means through which it does so is its range of lyrical topics, which forgoes cliché (or at the very least directly recognizes them, and works with and then past them) and overall tell an honest (sometimes brutally honest) message.
This is not to say that Say Anything doesn’t have its fair share of songs about girls and relationships and love and all that (of course, they do); but it’s done in a particularly straightforward and sincere manner, rather than wallowing in sappy sentiments. Beyond that, the album moves through a variety of brusque themes including sex, drug use, and consistent introspective looks at the nature of their music and what it means to be a part of a particular musical scene. The spoken word intro on the album’s first track, ‘Belt,’ lets the listener know exactly what the next hour will be like, with the simple statement, “And the record begins with a song of rebellion.” And, indeed, it is such: a five-minute journey in the vehicle of Bemis’ disdain for the “sheep and shepherds” that populate his world, presumably not only along the path of his musical development but his life in general. It is a vibrant song which elicits the urge to experience life in all its complexities, on your own terms, with the full-throated roar of a man drunk on life (and plenty else) and looking for something or someone to fight, anything to define yourself as unequivocally against. And this is exactly what the song closes with, effected through a chorus of male voices echoing back Bemis’ lines, “So what say you / And all your friends, / Meet all of my friends / In the alley tonight?”
The album’s second track, ‘Woe’ goes on to play with a homonym of the go-to filler word of almost all musical forms, the ubiquitous exclamation “whoa!” (which even Say Anything use often enough), yet is tongue-in-cheek playful about its witty wordplay while simultaneously tackling disparately more serious themes.
…Is a Real Boy is replete with songs like this – energetic, humorous, and whimsically ironic, while underneath still bravely willing to addressing more serious, personal, and often darker subjects.
A superb example is the album’s stand-out single, “Alive with the Glory of Love,” a simple, catchy tune about a passionate, loving relationship between two people, which focuses equally on the lively physical component of that relationship (in the typical, unabashed fashion Say Anything seems to address topics of sex) as well as the deeper emotions of the personal commitment between two people. But then all this is placed amidst the backdrop of a ghetto during World War II, with the primary characters being sent off to “separate work camps” (they are apparently musical simulacra of Bemis’ grandparents, who were Holocaust survivors), yet through all this their love endures. All this seeming musical complexity is perfectly summed up in one, evocative line from that track, which stands as the intelligent, thoughtful, and surprisingly entertaining thesis statement of the song: “Our Treblinka is alive, with the glory of love.”
While I’m trying to keep this relatively short (ha!), I must give this band their proper due, and I would be remiss if I didn’t note a few more songs on this album which deserve special recognition, the first of which comes after eleven tracks of decidedly punk-inspired rock, when the album suddenly swerves into the territory of the almost-mandatory acoustic ballad, called ‘I Want to Know Your Plans.’ While many of the other bands who have fiddled with the form have done so in a pleasing-enough (read: “catchy”) manner on their surface, it is all too common for those forays into the slow melodies of a ballad to abide by a recipe for overly-generic messages and melodramatic vocals. Yet with this track Say Anything injects the same amount of gritty realism into the slow love song as they do with all others on this album, and it comes off as a very frank and touching tune, which adeptly expresses the complex emotions surrounding the impending loss of a loved one who is leaving. Love songs may be as common as fruit flies in summer – annoying, and buzzing through the air with an infuriating frequency; but this song (sticking with my poorly-contrived fly metaphor) is that big-ass horsefly that you encounter on that gloriously sunny day at the beach, the one that bites you, hard, leaving you stinging and wondering just what the hell that was that just got you so good, and whose lingering ability ensures that you will be remembering at least one of its kind this summer. ‘I Want to Know Your Plans’ is both affecting and effective – a rare gem which shines forth from the trite musical form of the rock ballad, and Say Anything should be applauded for that.
But, the album’s strongest track is yet to come, and Say Anything has certainly saved one hell of a doozie for the album’s close, for they reserved the strongest, most elemental show of the band’s entire range of explosive energy, fury-driven recriminations, intelligent verbiage, and oddly apropos self-deprecation for the final six minutes of frenzied, spewing punk rock in the form of the song, ‘Admit It!’ Very simply, this song embodies the singular nature of Say Anything in the genre, for it not only reprimands – in a manner which conjures up images of Holden Caulfield – the “faker”s and “fraud”s of the pop culture, the “prototypical non-conformist”s who have become de facto followers due to their wide-eyed devotion to mainstream trends, but also spends just as much time with self-aware introspection on how the singer himself engages in the same admittedly childish and narcissistic behavior. Through this song Max seems to move from thesis (railing against the unoriginality and scene-minded mentality of others), through antithesis (recognizing in himself the same characteristics), all the way to a muddled, yet transcendent, form of synthesis, where he recognizes these issues and concomitantly accepts their place in his life while still showing himself capable of moving beyond these qualities; to define himself through his own, individual actions taken in the course of a less-than-perfect life, but a life which Max says, many times throughout the song, he is proud of. And by song’s end, the listener can truly believe him.
What is it about Say Anything that is ultimately so enjoyable? Is it the way the vocals are so forcefully spit that gets your blood to a slow boil, working you up to an exuberant vitality on par with the music itself? Is it the way the instrumentation utilizes typically metal tunings for a decidedly pop-punk-rock genre, to give the music an uncharacteristically heavy and powerful sound? Is it the humorous and gritty nature of the lyrics which so aptly translate the complexities of life (even the heightened complexities of a bipolar life such as that of Max Bemis’) to music? Well, yes, to all of these, but I think that it’s primarily two things. First, Say Anything’s dedication to that ever-constructive tendency of self-awareness (and the resultant self-examination of their music) - which, judging by the quality of most music out there, nowhere near enough bands seem capable of. And second, Say Anything’s fairly strict avoidance of musical formulae. The result is a truly inventive rejuvenation of the punk rock genre, plain and simple.
