Review Summary: are you okay?
Mental health is a succubus of everyday life that we’ve all been drained by one time or another to varying degrees. It’s not gonna change anytime soon, and part of the beauty in life is finding your way to adapt to it, supposedly through finding yourself. The trouble with that, is that gonna be through you finding yourself in a monotonous cycle of wake up, working, sleeping, and repeating? Or are you gonna find yourself holding your head from the toilet after od’ing on opioids you picked up from the street after working a one time job and pub crawling with friends. One common coping mechanism most people succumb to is that of alcohol. Whether it’s picked up genetically, or you just pick it up through blatant accessibility, it’s a problem maybe of us touch on and there’s nothing romantic about it.
The Future Is Cancelled is a perfect meditation on the everyday man and with trudging chords and painfully realistic tellings of the american nightmare, alcohol, the consequences of the lacking love we admire, and everything in between. Through their energy and honest misery, Captain, We’re Sinking create the quintessential punk album but also one of the only true
human albums in
The Future Is Cancelled
The haunting clashes, the broken voice that sings, the seemingly endless spiral of ringing that the intro track “Adultery” erupts with, is a dark tale of young love and leaving with nihilistic screams that’ll keep the lyrics
”relapse,” “you’re in my head,” and
”she don’t love me but she loves my mom,” ringing in your ears for hours after a listen in such a uniquely coveted fashion. The album manages to take such mundane and overly written about commentaries on substance abuse and relationships and give them such a dark and almost sadly honest twist, while taking them to a whole separate echelon of catharsis. They blend these dark and depraving ideologies with such infectious melodies and even more painful harmonies. They manage to create such angsty ideas and have them so creatively yet effortlessly presented, it makes the darkness of our lives shine. Songs like “Annina, We Will Miss You” take the story of a girl who seems to be manically depressed and holed up into a mental facility, strapped and all, coming to terms with her sickness in one of the most cathartic punk songs perhaps even of all time. The album then just continues to flow on with incredible guitar work from both vocalists/guitarists Bobby Barnett and Leo Vergnetti flowing like violent rainfall on the windowsill and Zack Charette/Bill Orender’s bass/drum work pulsating with as much emotion you can evoke in percussive instrumentation. The atmosphere of wisdom, suffering, and honesty all conveyed through the masterpiece that is
The Future Is Cancelled is one that can not be mirrored by another record and probably never will be, instrumentally, lyrically, nor morally.
But it’s not just the painstaking honesty and “everyday” mentality
The Future Is Cancelled necessarily has to offer, but one of its many paragons is that the scope reaches out to everybody in some shape way or form. To put it simply and perhaps a tad too personally, when I first discovered this record I was maybe 14 years old. At the time, the metaphors of alcoholism and the religious allusions completely went over my head but the music worked so goddamn well, I was addicted to it almost. Cut to 16 and a few months, I’ve had incredibly dangerous bouts of substance abuse and manic depressive episodes and whether I’m happy or whether I’m screaming out loud in public trying to find some solace in my withdrawn and depraved mentality through broken coffee cups and torn papers, the album declares itself as no winner, and it isn’t an album to do so. It’s a humble depiction of the isolation, the depression, and the ghosts of ourselves we fear we’ll meet again or even worse yet to meet at all.
The Future Is Cancelled isn’t an album about getting better, it’s an album about growing up, realizing who you are, and getting the fuck over it. Life is ugly, it’s been uglier, and it may get uglier and there’s nothing beautiful about that aspect of it, the world isn’t as beautiful a place as we make it out to be sometimes but that’s okay, it’s what we signed up for.
The Future Is Cancelled pulls us out of orbit to remind us of our vices, our mental instability, those monotonous cycles, those addictions, holding our heads from the toilets, and who we strive to be. It show us we need to do all what we can with what we’re given because whether we want to give in or not, that’s the true american dream; that’s all we can do.
“and don’t take me at the word // it’s just the state i’m in // i’m drunk and i am worn out // and these sleepless nights are beating me // it’s the irony, it’s the self defeat of giving up a crutch // it’s like a grudge you’ll be forgiven // but right now i need another one” - Shoddy Workmanship
