Review Summary: "Jesus, this can't be for real."
So here's how I'm gonna do this.
I'm not gonna bother telling you why
Morbid Stuff is the most fully realized PUP project to be released. I'm not gonna analyze the meaty guitar tones that coat the album in a pop glaze while delivering classic underdog-indie-rock hits. I won't talk for a second about the pop potential of songs like "Kids" or "See You At Your Funeral." I'm not even gonna
mention the breakdown at the end of "Full Blown Meltdown" that makes the hardcore temper tantrum all worthwhile. I'm not gonna talk about the melancholy narrative of "Scorpion Hill" and its country-punk tinge, nor am I going to speak of the winding guitar leads of "Bloody Mary-Kate and Ashley." I'm definitely not going to compare this project to PUP's last two, because that would frankly be impossible.
And now that I've wasted a paragraph being facetious, I'm gonna tell you what
Morbid Stuff means to me.
Morbid Stuff means bad memories. It means pressure from someone I loved to be someone I didn't love. It means a bad breakup over FaceTime from my therapist's office. It means an ensuing week of torture. It means getting ***faced with my friends when their parents weren't home, and throwing up in their neighbor's yard. It means doing some serious self-reflection, and discovering that I am a much bigger piece of *** than I thought. It means getting blocked by her after she realized I wasn't crawling back.
Morbid Stuff means staring at my phone waiting for one last text from her, even though she didn't want to send one. It means making a Twitter account just to be sure she didn't do something drastic because of me. It means putting her in the past. It means writing a story about moving on, and starting to heal. It means going to junior prom alone, because junior prom is stupid anyway. It means getting a new haircut, and it means talking to new people and leaving my old friends behind.
Morbid Stuff unironically changed my life, and while it's kind of weird to say, I feel that this album deserves nothing but the highest of praise for serving as a mirror and reflecting all of the listener's worst features. And while I don't think it's PUP's most heart-wrenching (
The Dream is Over) or their most fun (
PUP), I think this is PUP firing on all cylinders.
