Album Review: On the Impossible Past by The Menzingers

Punk rock can have real slow years, and 2011 was one of them. Sure, Fucked Up grabbed all the indie headlines, Frank Turner delivered another dependably solid album, and Against Me! put out that really good EP, but 2011 was kind of a wash year for the genre after a really solid 2010. A year in which we mostly saw side projects (Chuck Ragan, Brian Fallon), reunions (Blink-182) and disappointments (again, Blink-182) take over the landscape.

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Zzzzzzzzzing! While they’ve always written accessible punk rock, The Menzingers’ third album sees them take their slightly atypical song structures (they’re not much into the verse / chorus / verse way of thinking) and make them catchier than ever; whether it’s increasing their sing-along potential on ‘Good Things’ and ‘The Obituaries’, phenomenal song craft on ‘Sun Hotel’ or experimentation with new guitar effects on ‘Nice Things.’ But what propels this record along is the voice they’ve maintained since their first EP; they might use fewer chords, simpler riffs and less ambiguous lyrics than other more complex bands – but God damn, they say so much more. .

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Review Summary: "Coz I cursed my lonely memory with picture-perfect imagery".Ever since their inception in 2006, The Menzingers did not quite seem like your average punk-rock band. Sure, their debut LP 'A Lesson in the Abuse of Information Technology' was as uneven and raucous as what their peers were releasing, while follow-up 'Chamberlain Waits' added the necessary dose of melody and anthemic sing-alongs. Yet, there was something bubbling underneath the surface which suggested that the Pennsylvanian quartet had greater ambitions.

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Stunning third album from maudlin Pennsylvania punks. Alistair Lawrence 2012 While it’s not uncommon to discover music that can offer sweet relief from the bad times, it’s much rarer to discover bands who make the bad times sound fantastic. The Menzingers do just that, with their mix of anxiety and black humour. Not to mention the towering, infectious high caused by their rousing brand of rugged rock music.

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Pennsylvania's the Menzingers have been operating on a cycle of great expectations and fulfilling them since before breakthrough album Chamberlain Waits was released in 2010. And on their new full-length, much-anticipated Epitaph debut On The Impossible Past, they exceed expectations once again. Kicking off with "Good Things," a song that starts small and explodes (not unlike another standout, "Ava House"), it's a track about a touring act's road weariness, but in the context of the album's 13 tracks, it's a steady unravelling as a band of great, young American storytellers.

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Gone are the days that punk music was used solely for outcries of social discontent, rebellion and anarchy. Like everything, punk has evolved. In this day, rather than reflecting on problems of a national scale, bands are now more willing to focus internally on the issues that they have to deal with themselves in their day to day lives. Issues that cause them personal suffering, real life affairs that an audience can relate to and acknowledge, making the listener feel closer to a band than ever before.

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