Review Summary: "We're safe here."
My first time listening through
The Thrill of Living, I began to think of it as “fun”. And it is fun at times--certainly more so than the monotonously somber twinkly emo created by the likes of American Football and Empire! Empire! “Kettlers of Satan” bubbles along with a danceable energy, the distorted guitars kick in halfway through “I Can’t Sleep” in an incredibly satisfying way, and the dismissal of the hateful in “The Hand Strikes and Gives a Flower” is infused with a fantastic dry wit: “They said, ‘You’re queer,’ and I said, ‘You finally got something right.’” I made other surface-level observations during that first listen, about the strength of the songwriting, the tight musicianship, the balance of variation and cohesion in the collection of songs. I noted the comparisons that online blurbs drew between Mimisiku and bands like The Promise Ring and Texas Is the Reason, and I added to the list in my head, noticing touches of Kidcrash, mewithoutYou, and even Los Campesinos!--though I eventually concluded that no combination of comparisons could sufficiently encompass the 90s alt rock feel of “I Still Can’t Sleep,” the almost jazzy chords of “It Depends On Whether Your Conception of Time Is Linear or Circular,” and every other sound that makes an appearance on
The Thrill of Living. I finished the album and continued with my day, thinking of it as a well written and refreshingly energetic emo album, but little more.
Then I started to feel the itch of lyrics that had inconspicuously burrowed into my skull: Lyrics like “I’ll stop your suffering by ending my own” (“Kettlers of Satan”), and “I’m choking on all this air that I never learned how to breathe” (“A Constant State of Disrepair”). I found myself craving more bittersweet chords, more frantic drumming, more of Parker Lawson’s exasperated voice. So I listened to the album a second time. And a third. And over and over again, somehow unable to think about anything but Mimisiku for hours on end.
It sounds like I’m describing an addiction, but it’s more accurate to think of
The Thrill of Living as an oasis than as a drug. It’s a place apart from the rest of the world--not necessarily to forget that it exists, but to openly say and think and feel things that we might otherwise try to repress or keep hidden. Mimisiku lead by example in this regard, shamelessly pouring out their deepest vulnerabilities. This is perhaps most explicit on “The Hand Strikes and Gives a Flower,” in which vocalist Parker Lawson pushes back against the self-hate that the world has tried to instill in them by wearing their deviances as badges of pride. But just because they’re honest, that doesn’t mean they’re always so sure of themselves. On “It Depends On Whether Your Conception of Time Is Linear or Circular,” they respond to the death of someone close by asking, “How am I this empty? Am I devoid of sympathy, or am I just too scared to feel anything?” This is the kind of painful honesty that most emo bands only half-deliver, and it seems to come naturally to Mimisiku.
Of course, it probably doesn’t. It takes a lot of courage and a lot of work to share your vulnerabilities with anyone, let alone a bunch of complete strangers. But Mimisiku’s openness is so effective because it permeates every part of their music, from the lyrics, to the bittersweet guitars, to the frenzied drumming, to Lawson’s voice--crooning one moment and belting the next--to even their tongue-in-cheek approach to titling songs. “Cut Me Open and Crawl Inside Me, One of Us Should Live” and “The Hand Strikes and Gives a Flower” sound like generic lines thought up by a melodramatic emo act, but they’re not; they’re quotes from
Bob’s Burgers and
The Office (respectively) and they demonstrate that Mimisiku can approach their pain from a perspective of irony and humor. Hell, they take their band name from
Jungle 2 Jungle, an utterly forgettable mid-‘90s family comedy starring Tim Allen. It’s a downright dorky reference, but it doesn’t occur to the band to be ashamed.
All of this would be incomplete if the album wasn’t also imbued with a sense of hope, and it’s oddly appropriate that Mimisiku direct most of that hopefulness not at the world as a whole, but at the people who have struggled with the world just as much as they have. The world might be sh
itty to them, but they’ve managed to survive it this long, and they’re confident that they--and, by extension, their listeners--can continue surviving, be it by throwing a dismissive middle finger at the voices that tell them to hate themselves (“The Hand Strikes and Gives a Flower”) or by finding friends who make them want to stay alive (“Ukume”). The end result is an album that carves out a cathartic space for the listener to feel safe from their struggles, secure in their insecurities, and comfortable being just as honest as Mimisiku are, even if it’s just with themselves. Ultimately, it all goes back to that album title:
The Thrill of Living. Life can certainly be hard and painful--and disproportionately so to certain people--but it can still be exciting, cheerful, and, yes, even fun. And thank God for bands like Mimisiku for reminding us of both sides of that fact.
