Modern Baseball - Holy Ghost

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(Big Scary Monsters)

Related: Modern Baseball: meet the band tackling pop-punk’s crude image

Pop-punk, with its goofy songs full of knob and poo gags, in which women (girlfriends, mothers, etc) are mostly depicted as sources of irritation, has long been the genre of choice for a certain type of adolescent male. However, Philadelphia’s Modern Baseball head the field of newer bands trying to take it somewhere deeper. With guitarists Jake Ewald and Brendan Lukens splitting vocal duties, chugging guitars abound, but their third album addresses alternative young adulthood concerns including grief, depression and mental health.

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Modern Baseball became a popular band writing songs about Facebook and Instagram and emulating the selective communication of those social media platforms: revealing personal minutiae without ever having to be vulnerable. Throughout 2012’s Sports and 2014's You’re Gonna Miss It All, Jake Ewald and Brendan Lukens sang mostly about girls, social insecurity, and punk rock hypocrisy—nothing that the average person in their audience hadn’t experienced themselves.

Since then, Modern Baseball have unexpectedly evolved into an important band. After canceling an Australian tour last fall, Lukens went to rehab and was diagnosed with manic depression, alcoholism, marijuana addiction, and cutting behavior, all of which was unsparingly detailed in their Tripping in the Dark mini-doc. Every Modern Baseball interview in the time since has doubled as advocacy for destigmatizing mental illness and encouraging the seeking of medical treatment. They’re not alone: Along with Sorority Noise, the Word Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, the Hotelier and basically any leader of emo’s 4th-wave, Modern Baseball demonstrate an undeniable sonic ambition and social conscience in a genre still reduced to a “Sad as Fuck” T-shirt. Their extracurricular candor is a necessary complement to Holy Ghost, which asks for difficult things out of its audience—space, patience and acceptance.

In the past, MoBo’s appeal often lied in how they looked like guys who came to their shows straight from a Drexel lecture hall, singing about things that happened to them just that day. On Holy Ghost, Ewald and Lukens admit that even a wholly unpretentious, image-free band like Modern Baseball might have to put on an act sometimes just to make it to the next gig. “The glare from our stupid, spineless words just whining, every fucking day/what do I really want to say?,” Ewald spews on “Note to Self,” one of the many road-weary tracks here. Throughout Holy Ghost, Lukens and Ewald mostly want to say “I miss you,” “I love you,” or, “I’m sorry.” But with their friends, family and Philly often hundreds of miles away, Modern Baseball either internalize or end up directing their anxieties at each other.

There was a point where it was unclear whether Modern Baseball would make it to Holy Ghost, and the tension is audaciously presented in a Speakerboxxx/The Love Below-style split condensed into less than a half hour. Ewald is given the first six tracks, while the remaining five are Lukens’. Even up to last year’s excellent MOBO Presents: The Perfect Cast EP featuring Modern Baseball, new listeners could be forgiven thinking the band only had one singer. At this point, Ewald and Lukens seem like total inverses of each other.

Holy Ghost will inevitably take on a new life as its lyrics become status updates. All the zingers will be Ewald’s, but since his hooks are as densely worded and occasionally unwieldy as his verses, the shoutalongs come from Lukens. Ewald’s side builds towards “Everyday” and “Hiding,” the most compositionally complex and ornately arranged Modern Baseball songs to date. Lukens, meanwhile, claims he wrote all of his lyrics in the last three days of recording. His songs are urgent, frenzied and compact, with titles that read like inside jokes used as placeholders (“Breathing in Stereo,” “Coding These To Lukens," “Apple Cider, I Don’t Mind”).

The format serves each writer as an individual. While the shift towards tempered indie rock often robs Holy Ghost of the instant gratification of early MoBo, there isn’t a single clunker lyric that was wedged in for the sake of cleverness. Taken together, Holy Ghost feels inevitably unbalanced. Modern Baseball probably didn’t have much of a choice; shuffled in any way, it just becomes nonsensically disjointed.

The sequencing makes more sense upon hearing the closing “Just Another Face,” whose chorus alone more than makes up for any denied catharsis. Based on The Perfect Cast and their live Killers covers, an album full of this kind of bombastic arena-emo would be certainly welcome. It consolidates every improvement over You’re Gonna Miss It All: Ewald’s compositional ambition and patience, Lukens’ newly theatrical high range and for both, a desire to recognize the bittersweet way in which the relationship between them and their audience has changed.

The self-pity of the verses are simply and petulantly worded to recall MoBo’s earlier phase and Lukens’ real rock bottom (“I’m a waste of time and space,” “entering a well-known phase, I scream ‘get lost, I hate everything’”). A number of people might be the voice talking to Lukens during the unabashedly uplifting chorus. Perhaps it’s his family, or Cam Boucher, the Sorority Noise frontman Lukens credits with pushing him to seek help. Maybe it’s a girlfriend, as the title references a lyric from the first song Lukens ever wrote ("How Do I Tell a Girl I Want to Kiss Her," naturally). It could be the other members of Modern Baseball, who Lukens claims “saved my life.” Earlier on "Note to Self," Ewald hoped to build “something that cannot leave the ground/unless we lift it up together,” and Holy Ghost makes good on that desire: Every performance of "Just Another Face" will end with Modern Baseball and their audience yelling at each other, “I’ll be with you the whole way.”

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A couple of years later, we get Holy Ghost, the first of their releases recorded by someone outside of the band. Bringing in An Actual Producer suggests that this record would be an even more emphatic announcement of Modern Baseball’s status as a fully-fledged band-with-a-capital-B. But actually, Holy Ghost points back towards their own origins; offering a stark reminder of the dual-songwriter acoustic duo at the project’s core.

Modern Baseball have always done a great job of blending the distinct song writing and vocal performances of co-frontmen Jacob Ewald and Brendan Lukens. On Holy Ghost, however, the division is made explicit. The record is split exactly down the middle; Ewald’s songs making up the first half, Lukens’ making up the second. It’s quite curious decision, resulting in a record that doesn’t cohere very strongly, presumably by design, despite running at a svelte 28 minutes.

Ewald remains the chattier performer, with his songs making up the album’s darker and drabber sounding front half. The usual elements of the Modern Baseball sound are present and correct: crunchy palm-muted power chords; simple melodic runs of lead guitar; and an endearing fixation on run-of-the-mill detail (“Days like this I miss listening to records, making coffee together, snow globes and Jersey sheets”).

What’s gone is the youthful abandon, and the shrug-off humour. Putting aside the lyrical content, Ewald simply sounds like he’s getting older. His even tone is reduced to a borderline spoken word performance. A chorus refrain of “there will be no more fucking about today” couldn’t sound less convincing, and by the time we hit the mid-point strings of the autumnal ‘Coding These To Lukens’, it’s clear that we’re dealing with a different band whose mantra used to be ‘whatever, forever’. It’s matured, but muted.

Lukens’ contributions erupt out of nowhere; releasing a palpable sense of tension which has built across the front half of the album. You can almost see stage divers hurtling through the air in relief. And even by Modern Baseball’s previous standards, not just in comparison to Ewald’s offerings, these songs contain some of the band’s punchiest work to date – two minute powerhouses of snarling, shimmering distortion, climaxing in blistering shout-along hooks. This half offers stronger material, but it’s less coherent than Ewart’s 15 minutes.

Because of its unusual structure, Holy Ghost rarely manages to play to all of its strengths at once. It’s a bold choice, both interesting and admirable in its way, but it’s hard to get past the fact that it undoubtedly lifts towards its conclusion – building towards an energy it never properly inhabits. Its final song is its best – a driving, anthemic moment of catharsis which proves that Modern Baseball doesn’t have to go full pelt to achieve full effect. Hopefully their next record will go back to melding their strengths in this way, rather than dividing them into disparate halves.