Review Summary: i'll put my life back together in silence.
Something about the American dream scares me. The cold sweats I wake up with in the middle of the night don’t help either. I used to spend days at a time thinking about what I would do and who I would become when I grew up. I remember the first time I listened to
Suburbia. I walked into the mall circa age 13 or 14 or so, and I noticed my local FYE was closing down and they were selling CDs to the local kids like the McDonald’s drive-thru caters to stoners. In the back where the remnants of said musical nuclear fallout reside, I picked up a bunch of random albums for about $5. This is where I found the sad pigeon staring at me like a raccoon dead on the road. I still don’t really remember my reasoning for picking it up, maybe I could make a sarcastic joke about how “I just had love at first sight with this album” bullshit but I’ll leave it to you. For some reason, I guess my CD was a misprint or something because it always played in a completely different track listing than the actual records tracklisting. So on the ride home I put it in and it skips around for about 10 or 15 seconds, and then the lone acoustic guitar that begins “I’ve Given You All” plays and the breaking cathartic vocals from Dan “Soupy” Campbell ring out through my shitty car stereo as he speaks of the homeless vet in his hometown who was stabbed and killed without justice. It immediately threw me off completely. At the surface level it just seemed like some generic midwest emo album maybe with some conceptual element and charm so that was enough for me to pick it up. But once you really get into this record there are so many layers and lyrical intricacies that only come with time, as well as some of the most intriguing and energetic instrumentals in the genre.
Suburbia plays almost like an anthology of everyday monotony. I remember one day listening to it on a bus, and this woman was crying just staring at the floor. And that’s what the rest of us were doing; just staring at the floor. We all knew what was going on, but we all just
chose to not do anything. We knew we couldn’t do anything though, it just seemed to phase right past everybody else on board. I felt like I was staring through a glass shower door watching water droplets hit the floor, and I couldn’t get into to turn it off. I felt terrible. The same thing happened a couple days later but it was with a man, about mid 20’s this time around, and then the dissociation felt more apparent, I didn’t feel as bad that time around, I’m not exactly sure why. A couple more days on that Monday, another lady was crying, and I didn’t feel the need to turn off the shower at all. I wasn’t staring through the glass door anymore, I was barely outside the bathroom. I felt isolated and dissociated like the rest of the people on the bus. This is when I realized this is what
Suburbia was all about. It’s about not giving up, it’s about turning off the shower, it’s about getting better and after that third time I knew what I had to do. I talked to the girl on that Monday and her mom had died a few days before. I felt absolutely horrible about it and after talking to her about it, I took her out to coffee and tried to help her more and now she has become one of my greatest friends. Hell, she’s probably reading this right now, even if we don’t talk like we used to. After that, it was the realization that no matter how many times I would blast “Local Man Ruins Everything” to try and feel a bit better about who I am, the lyrics would still ring true, it’s not about forcing happiness; it’s about not letting the sadness win.
But it’s memories and experiences like these that make this album so much better. I was listening to “And Now I’m Nothing” through the huge bluetooth speaker that probably cost more than the shitty twin sized mattress I was trying to cram it on, and through the heat and sweat, I realized something. There had been many nights where I had the same experience, just cramming myself on my mattress without bedsheets, having my thighs stick together in this Florida summer like glue in the heat, and blasting shity pop punk through my speaker. But I wouldn’t remember it tomorrow. I wouldn’t remember it at all. Just like I hadn’t remembered the previous time, nor the time before that. It’s like how school gets late in the year or working too long for a period of time. You just kind of forget, and everything stops phasing you. That’s okay though; that’s life I suppose. I can spend as many years ghosting the world as I want, but it’s albums like
Suburbia that bring me back down that I can’t ask anything more from. Maybe I’ll grow up eventually; I’m sick of running away.
It’s not all lyrically based though, Dan “Soupy” Campbell’s lyrics have some of the best (if not, the best) instrumental support in “pop” punk. The subtle lead guitar parts that trickle into the verses of songs like “Local Man Ruins Everything” and “Don’t Let Me Cave In” invoke so much emotion and thought just by themselves. The extraordinary rhythm section from Mike Kennedy and Josh Martin provide a backbone that still continuously has me dancing alone in my room like a walking dunce. Of course, Soupy’s lyrics and vocal delivery still ring out as the crown jewel in the shining opus that is
Suburbia. The issue with pop punk is there will always be bands with vocalists in their 30’s talking about meandering teenage bullshit, but The Wonder Years, with their introspective take on modern life and the wars we fight on the daily, will always hold a special place in my heart. I had the same dream that Soupy did about being the so-called “Allen Ginsberg of this generation”, but we knew in the end we would all become our own individual human beings with our own unique traits and our own faults, and to me, that is so much fucking better than being some Ginsberg ripoff.
