The Menzingers - After the Party

Drowned In Sound 90

The abrupt and melancholy middle eight that cuts through the song like a hot knife through butter answers that question with no hesitation. Showing the band at their best, it’s a fine metaphor for the realities of life crashing headlong into the responsibility-free days of youth. For a generation of delayed-adolescence, freelance contract, hand-to-mouth adults, the Philadelphia punks are asking the awkward questions that are keeping us all up at night pondering our own futures.

On their latest effort the band have set out to craft an unstoppably melodic album primed for bar-room sing-alongs, and with their songwriting now five albums deep and as insightful and poignant as ever, they’ve had absolutely no problem achieving that goal (and then some). Whether it’s a beer-swilling, basement-crowd-inciting anthem or an introspective whisky-stained sway-along, The Menzingers know their onions and by God do they like ‘em blue collar, wistful and rose-tinted.

‘Lookers’ is an early highlight which smoulders like a cigarette and then explodes into existence with an almost impossible romance, as Barnett and fellow vocalist Tom May pore over old photographs and memories in a torrent of reminiscent turns of phrase which are startling in their simplicity. They remain one of the finest contemporary pairings of lyricists that the punk scene has to offer.

Working from notes they’ve taken on nights out and conversations with friends and family, theirs is observational story telling in its purest, undiluted form, significance and meaning drilled down into every apparent off-the-cuff remark or small detail. Lines like “you were such a looker in the old days” somehow carry a weight that belie their apparent insignificance, elegantly and succinctly communicating both hope and regret with a cutting honesty.

Whilst it’s true that Barnett and May seem somewhat preoccupied with the theme of battling against growing up and stepping in line, with the apologetically touching ‘Midwestern States’ an open missive to sleeping on floors and couches and inconveniencing their hosts, it’s an understandable reflection of the pressures many face in a society geared towards taking the path more travelled.

With the arts facing brutal funding cuts and musicians struggling to make ends meet, the lifestyle they live requires very real sacrifice, a difficult pill to swallow if your contemporaries are settling down with kids, pensions and mortgages. Bursting with new inspiration and direction, After the Party is the triumphant sound of a songwriting duo reaping the rewards of those sacrifices, a group of friends on an unstoppable streak of home runs. A celebration of a life lived in the moment, a life that doesn’t know where it’s going but isn’t afraid to embrace the freedom of that fact, a life that squeezes beauty from every tiny nuanced moment.

With the narrative of the world increasingly ruled by divisive callousness and a lack of empathy, we need bands like The Menzingers to remind us that there is good in the world. There is friendship, love and understanding, and whilst their courses may not always run smooth, they’re infinitely preferable to the alternative. There is light and hope in the world, tinged with darkness as it might be, but that’s no reason to stop believing.

Previous records from The Menzingers have been albums to lose yourself in, but this time the stakes are different. After the Party isn’t an album about finding yourself, it’s an album about building yourself piece by piece, stitching up your tattered soul with creativity and love.

“Hey, do you really wanna throw it away? I’ll do anything to make you stay”

Pitchfork 65

The Menzingers are classic rock bards with expired Warped Tour laminates, as rooted in Social Distortion and ska as they are Springsteen and Kerouac. This is their thing, and five albums in, they have it so down that it threatens to leave nothing to the imagination. Their fiercely beloved and unabashedly nostalgic dirtbag opus On the Impossible Past challenged Celebration Rock for 2012’s most accurately titled album. Its follow-up led off with “I Don’t Wanna Be an Asshole Anymore,” which emphatically slam-dunked its premise and left the rest of the dispirited Rented World to pick up the shattered backboard. And if there’s any doubt about what After the Party is getting at, the very first chorus rants “Where we gonna go now that our 20s are over?”

“Post-30 punk” feels like a subgenre of a subgenre at this point: age isn’t a number for Beach Slang, it’s a nullity, whereas Japandroids embraced maturity with the same legendary fire as their younger selves. After the Party works with more typical talking points: the buzz is shorter and the hangovers are longer. Can I hide these tattoos at my day job? Is playing Minor Threat on laptop speakers keeping it real or just lame? Am I too old to be sleeping on floors? Am I too old to be too broke to afford a hotel?

On first glance, single “Lookers” plays too much to stereotype, name-dropping Dean and Sal, “Julie from the Wonder Bar” and a hook of “Jersey girls are always total heartbreakers!” (also, lookers). Maybe it’s the “sha la la la!” in the chorus, but “Lookers” has a self-aware, sarcastic edge, an added pain of looking back on a seemingly rebellious youth and seeing just another kind of conformity. The Menzingers earn the benefit of the doubt when “Thick as Thieves” opens with a sly skewering of the songwriting process (“I held up a liquor store/ Demanding topshelf metaphors”) and “Tellin’ Lies” hits on a point where the difference between 29 and 31 really does feel like an entire decade: “When buying marijuana makes you feel like a criminal / When your new friends take a joke too literal.”

But this is a Menzingers album, so the laughs are momentary and ultimately futile deflections of fear. The narrators in these songs are people racing through their 20s who find themselves trapped in tour vans or, most of the time, relationships they can't convince themselves they deserve. “Midwestern States” provides a gutting account of a codependent and deeply-in-love couple couch-surfing across the country, unsure of when things will ever be different as their options and prospects dwindle with each passing year.

The Menzingers’ way with an anthem never fails them, even when the tough talkin’ boyfriends on “Charlie’s Army” and “Bad Catholics” lack definition beyond their bluster (“To everyone you’re such a sweet church girl/but I know your secret”), or the record’s best melody searches for the rest of a proper song (“House on Fire”). After the Party might actually be too well-designed for jukeboxes, as the relentless, face-to-the-glass production results in the sad cowpoke shuffle of “Black Mass” and the Meatloaf-inspired “The Bars” clocking in at about the same volume as everything else, denying a dynamic range that’s needed on a record that lives up to its title by sticking around one or two songs longer than it probably should.

At least it seems that way until “Livin’ Ain’t Easy.” The preceding title track could’ve easily been an exit ramp for Menzingers, a wizened, hard-earned moment of contentment where a couple looks back on their drunken nights and wake-n-bakes to a new morning, confiding, “after the party, it’s me and you.” But on the very next song, singer Greg Barnett remembers the foreclosure sign in the yard and the empty bank account, and hits I-80 to another show that will surely be the start of someone else’s debauchery. After the Party, though? It’s the hotel lobby and, “they’re always out of coffee.”