Review Summary: An album that benefits strongly from nostalgia, which covers up major flaws it is impossible to look (or rather, listen) past.
Context is everything.
I remember vividly the first time I ever heard this album. My best friend, Justin, had by chance wandered over to watch this band he had never heard of play a set on a small stage at Soundwave, and was blown away. On the way home from the gym together, before another backbreaking shift in the warehouse he helped me secure a job at, he said "listen to this" with a force of authority that I knew meant he was communicating something important. He popped an album into the CD player of his Lancer, skipped a track, and turned the volume up. We had both begun our serious musical adventures as through-and-through metalheads, until girlfriends and break ups tumbled us into the relatability of blink-182, which led us into punk. I had never heard a punk song like Burn After Writing before. Every note, every lyric; punk perfection. I was instantly hooked. Who could write a punk song THAT huge!? "That's The Menzingers, this is their latest album On The Impossible Past. You have to get it". So I did.
When I got the album, we were both a few years out of high school, we were both single and chasing the girls of our dreams (both blondes), we were both studying at university, and we both had the same job in the same warehouse. It was the twilight after the GFC. Every day, we wondered if we would get called in to work, how much money we would make that week, if it would be enough, and whether our studies would pay off. Every day was uncertain. Is the girl going to text me back? What if I mess everything up on the date? Do I have enough money for fuel, food, and rent? Life was bleak, uncertain, and every day was a battle for small wins. Our pursuit of happiness was akin to cracking the window open during a storm, and braving the cold and the wet hoping a ray of sunlight would shine through a tiny hole in the clouds to brighten maybe just a couple of hours of your day.
On The Impossible Past would play in my ears as I sat on the bus from home to university, from university to work, or from university to home if I didn't get called in. Often we would work the graveyard shift, haul up Sammy's huge speakers he hid under the workbenches, and crank the volume up loud after our boss left. I remember after one particularly bad argument with his new girlfriend, Justin had the speakers playing the same Menzingers song at full volume on repeat the whole shift. Tasker-Morris Station. After our long shifts of brutal backbreaking labour were done, we'd head to the gym, often finishing up later than 2AM, talking about our problems, trying to figure out how to get anywhere.
A couple of years later, my dream girl agreed to be my girlfriend. I had done it. She was perfect, against all the odds she was into me, and she liked to go on adventures and have fun. Two things sorely missing from my life. We caught a flight to the other side of the country to see The Menzingers play. By chance, I met Tom in a dive bar on Oxford Street. Being completely uncool, I stammered my way through awkward conversation, completely starstruck. But Tom broke the spell. He told me he looked up to or admired GG Allin, or something along those lines, but it shattered my perceptions of the band and their music so badly that I mostly just remember the feeling rather than the words. We saw the Menzingers play that night, and it was without a doubt, the greatest live show I have ever seen. I felt conflicted afterwards; what was I tacitly endorsing and enjoying here, who wants any association with GG Allin??? This is the perfect metaphor for how I as a fan treat the album. It has an important place in my heart, I tell everyone its a masterpiece, but really, I only listen to a few songs off it every now and then, and I don't really relate to them anymore (which is why they are important to me).
Which brings me to the album. On The Impossible Past is truly a product of its time. In new era of post-GFC, when the bubble popped and stagnation set in, no other album captured as completely the mood of transitioning from "what once was" to the new "what will be". We sang its lyrics, we felt its emotional weight, its notes harmonized perfectly with our heartstrings like a tuning fork in perfect pitch. It was a nostalgia album for the times we were already living in, and the times we missed that weren't even that long ago. They weren't even that long ago. Why couldn't we recapture those times? Why not? The past is just there, on the other side of the GFC. Why won't it come back? Because the past is the past, and its impossible to have it back. Its gone, its always gone. That's what it is.
But nostalgia tricks your mind, it makes you remember things differently to how they really were. Was the past really that good? Do you really want it back? That perfect girl who was so fun and into me? You mean the one who constantly texted other guys and would flirt with them infront of you? That one? That you broke up with because you couldn't handle the heartbreak and anxiety of the relationship anymore? On The Impossible Past captured the moment, by the reckons of the true believers of The Menzingers, its their best album. But sheesh, they weren't my best times. Not even close.
Lets be honest with ourselves.
The songs are unmissable live, but the album isn't a live show. The mixing is dreadful, letting down what should be huge highs for the album like Burn After Writing. Most of the songs are, at best, filler (do you really voluntarily listen to Sun Hotel?) and while there are hints at, and even moments of, punk greatness, they are few and far between. If we are being honest. Songs like Mexican Guitars hint at the greatness the Menzingers would display on later albums, but they are not greatness themselves. The guitars have interesting licks and ideas, but the mix washes them in and out, and you often wish for more. The lyricism, such a lauded aspect of the Menzingers, is strangely lacking. You got drunk every night before you did the dishes? You couldn't make me do or confess that with a gun to my head. The lyrical standout of the album, the bridge in The Obituaries, isn't even their original work and is lifted straight from a Vladimir Nabokov poem. "I am the shadow of the waxwing slain, I felt the false azure of window panes". I am the shadow of an ordinary brown bird, that chasing the false blue of the sky from within my prison-like apartment, smashed into the window pane. My dreams were illusions, and I died ordinary without achieving them. Powerful stuff, would be a huge plus for the album if they wrote the lyric themselves and came up with the poetry themselves.
I listened to this album all the way through before writing this review, fully intent on picking up on every detail to justify giving it the 5.0 classic status my heart believed it deserved, and I had a realisation. I had listened all the way through only once before. Most of these songs I skipped, or never listened to at all. I checked my playlist to see what had made it in from On The Impossible Past; Burn After Writing, The Obituaries and Nice Things. That was it. And the mixing on the songs wasn't great. When I'm in a Menzo's mood these days, I put After The Party on for a spin.
Nostalgically, I could give this album a 5.0 and my heart would tell me I'd made the right decision. But I'd be lying. Instead, I tell you its the best damn 2.0 star album on the planet. If we get another global economic crisis, maybe it'll work its way back to truly being worthy of a 5.0. But it just doesn't have it right now.
The album now sounds old, outdated, weary and tired. It lacks the energy of a more modern The Story So Far record, and on tracks like Ava House, it confuses loudness with energy. Tom yells like an emotionally defeated man trying to muster a flame of anger in attempt to prove to himself that he still feels something. It feels like yelling out when your boss calls you into work, banishing your freedoms for the day, but you need the money so you can't say no. So you just yell at your phone, defeated.
It's the best damn 2.0 star album on the planet. You have to get it.
