By Martin Castro (The Cascade) – Email
I’m not crazy about punk. It’s something I enjoy in small, strategically-placed instances in my life. However, Eighteen Hours of Static, Big Ups’ debut record, was one of the most enjoyable punk-influenced projects I’ve listened to.
Mostly because it’s funny. But the thing is, it’s not intentionally humourous.
Take “Justice,” the track that introduced me to Big Ups. There’s a lot of tension present throughout, the bass is choppy, and a guitar line rises and falls continuously — the whole thing increases in tension endlessly. And over top, in as lethargic a tone of voice as anyone could think of, vocalist Brendan Finn drones lines like, “We’re all walking through a no man’s land, but no one understands there’s a war on our hands,” and “Everyone’s so used to being used, that it means nothing on the front page news.”
These are the kind of bored, uncharacteristically lucid, dissatisfied quips The Simpsons’ Nelson Muntz would utter deadpan, staring at the camera, right before pointing at someone’s misfortune and laughing: “Haw-haw.”
And after 30 seconds of this, the instrumental kicks into high gear, and Brendan, instead of half-moaning, starts screaming over and over again: “Everybody says it’s getting better all the time but it’s bad! It’s bad!”
It’s really funny. The unexplained aggressiveness of the simple chorus has a lot of humour to it. Yeah, there’s most likely a commentary behind it, and it’s punk-ish. But really, all we get is a man screaming, at the top of his lungs. “I’m angry! I’m not happy with things! It’s bad! It’s bad!”
A lot of that unintentional playfulness is missing from Before A Million Universes.
Album opener “Contain Myself” is still as full of the same angst as Eighteen Hours, and the same lackluster repetition of depressive lines is used as pre-chorus material, but the delivery and instrumentals are all quite earnest. Most of Before plays out like this; seriously.
There’s still humour on the record: tracks like “Capitalized” are a less bleak show of levity, mostly in their arrangement, first all funky bass which is driven on relentlessly by drums, highlighting the angst in the chorus — all screams, all feedback. The instrumental, which is probably meant as a dig at the uniformity of normal songs comes off as a joke. I initially thought the entire record was just a more musically grounded version of its predecessor, though one in which the oddball lyricism got replaced with a comical amount of angst.
That’s what we get in Before A Million Universes: angst. Even when things are relatively calm, bass is used as a kind of marching band beat, it’s a sign of things to come. We know the track is going to devolve into dissatisfied howls and cacophony, we just don’t know when. The tension is ridiculous. We can barely hear the vocals in “Posture,” for example, until the chorus rolls around and things start getting yelled at us. We’re either straining to pay attention to the separate components of a track, or can’t escape them. There’s seldom a middle ground.
“Knight” is the most straightforward track, but only because it’s straight punk. Vocals are pretty reminiscent of Sid Vicious. But halfway through the track, the tempo cuts down to half its original measure, and we’re thrown into the angsty cacophony we’ve become accustomed to. Something’s gonna happen. We brace ourselves, It’s gotta happen.
And then the track just peters out into silence.
It’s a practical joke: we’re being fucked with. Or at least that’s how it seems.
Our expectations are being played with to a comical end that isn’t intended. Throughout the entire record, we’re presented with either total apathy, or angst, anger, and dissatisfaction, and the interplay between the two comes off as a joke: now I’m angry, now I’m sad, now I’m angry, now I’m sad.
On “Knight,” we expect one of the two. We’re building up to something and we’re either going to get really angry or really sad: we’re an emotional teenager storming away from the dinner table, complaining, “I’m just not understood!”
And unfortunately, despite Big Ups’ sincerity in presenting these emotions, the simplified and unexplained manner in which they do so is actually pretty funny.
Before a Million Universes is a weird listening experience, because it’s so earnest in its unquestioning dissatisfaction with literally everything that it becomes comical, and then we’re implicitly asked to sympathize with, or at least appreciate, this giant mess of auditory and lyrical dissatisfaction.
We’re supposed to also get angry, but instead of eliciting anger from me, it got a laugh. It was only after someone pointed out that Big Ups do indeed take themselves seriously and that this record is actually earnest that I realized it wasn’t just a big joke; it’s just really, really angry.
Somehow, it’s still kind of funny.
