Review Summary: A soundtrack to your early twenties
Palpable angst.
Is how I would describe Mock Orange’s debut, nines & sixes, were I permitted only two words. Seemingly riding the new wave of emo that would be popularized by the likes of Jimmy Eat World and American Football (although DNA is shared among all three), Mock Orange’s album is filled to the brim with creative ideas and a distinctly youthful approach to songwriting that you can’t help but be compelled by the hyperactivity of it all. Riffs move in-and-out and away like a schoolchild’s attention to task. The drumming is alternately blistering and glacial, like the deep breaths squeezed between the rapid inhalations of a panic attack. Even the bass, unfairly maligned in other contexts, is never restrained to the back corner of the mix. When it all coalesces, nines & sixes more than earns its inclusion into the discography of albums fueled by–and reflective of–the creativity and pressures of late adolescence and young adulthood.
If my take is a bit on-the-nose, consider the album title and realize that the band had every intention of delivering a soundtrack to the heartbreak, foolhardy idealism, stubbornness, and general disorganization of body and thought that follows in the wake of growing up. “All nines and sixes” was (and maybe still might be) a fairly common saying to describe a person in a state of disorder or confusion. The idiom was typically used to express one’s failing attempts at finding stability amidst chaos. What, then, could be a more appropriate saying for a young adult’s introduction to the real world? A world in which we wear certain skins, behave in certain ways, and attach precise feelings to vague understandings. Where we don’t know if we’re right or wrong half the time and assume incorrectly nearly all the time.
Palpable angst.
You can hear it in the push-and-pull of the songs. Songs switch-up abruptly like an intrusive thought. Incomplete musings and reflections scatter across the lyric sheets with lines starting and ending as quickly as a fresh guitar riff. At times there is a compulsive creativity on display; as if the band can barely contain themselves through one measure, fighting the urge to vomit up some new idea or transition to some stifled thought desperate for air. This is reined in by the close of the album as “Goodnight Reddick” sees the band doing their best American Football impression as strings are introduced against a repetitive and melodic backdrop before catapulting back into that familiar unrestrained energy (not to mention a count-in not dissimilar to "Never Meant").
Although released nearly 30 years ago, nines & sixes is an album that feels timeless while being anchored to a period and style of music that only matured with time. The album is a smorgasbord of midwest emo and pop punk influences and ideas fueled by a creative energy that only the young possess and the old admire. Like watching your younger self through the windows of time and appreciating the chaos, the angst, the nines and sixes, of youth. Because it all meant something.
