Review Summary: "this nightmare is boring me"
Oh, the irony in naming a band that tinkers with the different aspects of growing up ‘Great Grandpa’. A bunch of geriatrics in their early twenties, smoking weed for fun and not to mollify the arthritic pain in their hip. It’s short-sighted sincerity through and through, but I will always respect bands who write hooks that you can sing to yourself while inattentively watching reruns of Friends. I’ve never watched Friends, but I can see myself getting high and fawning over the same four chords like they are the epitome of beauty. I think that’s good enough.
Plastic Cough thinks that youth lasts forever. It also wishes youth would fuck off, move out, give way to something new. There are a few singalongs on this record, as in
NO, where the
la la las sound more than ever like Alex Menne is sticking her fingers in her ears and refusing to listen.
“No, I don’t fucking care”, she shrieks, because of course she doesn’t – her concern is reserved for a very select demographic: the moribund friends on
All Things…, the colourful faces in sepia-toned crowds on
Fade, or just some people she can smoke weed with on
28 J’s Later. The splintered, standoffish guitar work makes her stance unequivocally clear.
Obviously, then, this album speaks its conceits with superlatives. As in, I think Menne realises that she won’t zone out
“til she’s dead”, but apathy is a constantly growing thing, moving fast and efficaciously just so you don’t. Her friends aren’t
“almost dead”, either, they just refuse to go outside. But, when you hear that refrain – sung as a resignation, an ailing acceptance – you will feel it like the last time you bled young-adult insecurities all over your bedsheets.
And when an album like this refuses nuances and neglects the future, it works, because it portrays places we’ve been (perhaps too much) and shows us, vaguely distressed and static, that we too were once needlessly imposing iron bars on our front doors and playing nocturnal. Ergo,
Plastic Cough is deceptively simple, decidedly absent-minded. The record dances around its subject matter with references to pop culture because it can’t keep its head straight. Like, how do zombies factor into your disaffected twenty-something lifestyle? Great Grandpa aren’t paying attention either.
In my own circumlocutory way, I guess I’m just trying to say that these are not new ideas, but being dissatisfied with nothing is inherently curbed by moulding your anxieties around a coruscating guitar melody. So it goes, communicating its good will with a gnarled and twisted tongue, inadvertently helping itself when it doesn’t think it can actually be helped.
Be right back, my friends are here so we can sit around and do nothing together.
Fade, fittingly, will be playing in the background.
