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I wasn’t even going to pick up this album, but Say Anything’s self-titled third release is a gem of an album that will undoubtedly be one of my favorites of 2009.
I was a latecomer on the Say Anything bandwagon. Their anthemic debut album “… Is a Real Boy” was released in the summer of 2004, but I didn’t hear it for two years. I was turned on to the band’s particular brand of pop-punk that puts lesser bands to shame by a friend who was still listening to the album nonstop two years after its release. I was hooked. “… Is a Real Boy” and the subsequent supplement “… Was a Real Boy” are still high on the list of albums I can listen to in their entirety.
I wasn’t going to miss the Say Anything party again, and I got my hands on their follow-up two-disc opus “In Defense of the Genre” the day it came out. Critics loved it, but I was another story.
Suffice it to say, I haven’t listened to the album since that day. “Genre” sits on a shelf in my room, untouched since I first listened in 2007. The slew of guest vocalists — a whopping 24 of them — seemed gimmicky, and the album lacked the sense of cohesion that allowed me to listen to the previous release over and over again. I chalked Say Anything up as one of the many bands that simply couldn’t keep up.
I would have passed the new album by without a sideways glance but agreed to check it out at the behest of another former-fan. This album is even catchier than “… Is a Real Boy” and as interesting but in different ways. Gone are the schizoid guitar licks and frantic melodies. They are replaced by unexpected usage of strings, handclaps, vocal harmonizing and synthesized melodies — the latter most evident on “Crush’d,” which front- man Max Bemis jokingly refers to as sounding like a Timbaland song on Youtube.
The album opens with “Fed to Death” — a perfect intro to the tone of the entire track list: infectiously catchy and powerful pop-punk that forces listeners to tap their feet and nod their head. The tapping and nodding rarely stop but for the slower moments on the album, covered by the low-key moments in songs like “Eloise,” “Cemetery” and “Ahhh … Men.”
What separates Say Anything from similar bands — aside from composing the most intelligently written music in the universe of pop-punk — are the angsty and often vitriolic lyrics spawned from Bemis’ warped mind. The singer-songwriter expertly utilizes hilarious metaphors and other clever turns of phrase that often interrupt the listener’s stream of thoughts with sudden moments of “Wait, what did he say?” Read the following line from the first single “I Hate Everyone” and see for yourself: “When I was spat onto the Earth in a stream of guts / By mother nature, that green-eyed slut …”
Shakespeare it ain’t, but Say Anything’s lyrics add new flavor to the usual suspects of pop-punk song topics: girls, self-doubt and general feelings of self-consciousness, isolation and existential disgust.
Grade: A
