Review Summary: Leather gloves, meet summer sun.
As an adult, I’ve fallen in love with the last weeks of spring. Peaking green grass and snow-white slush cover my landscape with the distinct smell of something
new. As a teenager, my preference sat somewhere between fall and spring, the perfect climate for baggy jeans and a snug hoodie, but now I crave that chaotic transition.
I can’t come up with a more apt metaphor to place at the forefront for this album. This album is wearing leather gloves in the summer sun, an icy crunch with every withdrawal of my boot, and a t-shirt leaving my arms exposed to the winter wind. It describes feeling
out of place.
Joyride is Transit’s final album—and the only one I’ve liked. While it never popped into my life at a topical moment, it could have acted as a soundtrack for an ill-timed road trip after a rough breakup, for grabbing belongings back from my ex in a dainty coffee shop, or for spilling my worst secrets. It’s a strange concoction, to be sure: a few scoops of emo, a taste of pop, and a pinch of twang.
While the melodies serenade without grit, the lyrics pack angst into each tune. In
Rest to Get Better, Joe Boynton complains to an ex-lover, “You think you get honest. You only get meaner. You think it gets better. You only break cleaner.” Though the lyrical content mostly repeats similar themes like generally feeling sorry for himself and disliking his exes, either the word choice or the new melody make it seem freshened up each time. “You cut me down, down, just like a knife,” he dissects in
Fine by Me.
But the album doesn’t lean on angst like a crutch. It calls forth images of spring and summer and of discovering something new. Boynton takes time to reminisce in
Fine by Me, “We can walk everywhere like when we were eight years old, when home was anywhere but home and by ourselves was not alone.” Endearingly, he quotes loving lines from, presumably, his ex, reveling in her words that make up the chorus in
Pins and Needles, “I want the stars, bursting inferno. Cover my heart, twilight to shadow. Dancing on love, pins, and needles, I’m dancing on love, pins, and needles.”
For an album where the lead sounds a bit like Bo Burnham’s impression of a stadium country star, a startling amount of diversity entrenches itself in the track list. Some pop punk angst takes hold in
Saturday, Sunday,
Rest to Get Better,
Sweet Resistance, and
Loneliness Burns. Nostalgia and regret take center stage in
Fine by Me. And unabashed love dominates the listener’s attention in
Summer Dust and
Pins and Needles.
Give the album a spin and fall in love with the seasons changing, again. I do every time I listen to
Summer Dust, and Joe Boynton chants, “Let it go: a wave out the window! So far, so good, it’s all over, so let it go!”
