Review Summary: there's a way out, there's a way out, there's a way out, but it's not on our own
The redheaded step child of Ramshackle Glory's, even Pat the Bunny's discography as a whole, Who Are Your Friends Gonna Be? suffers from some obvious failures. Let's go ahead and get it out of the way: the production is godawful. The band produced it themselves and, while DIY is a valuable ethic, the record just...sounds bad. You can't hear ***. The drums are washed out, barely there. Everything is covered in a layer of fuzz, and not the cool lo-fi Neutral Milk Hotel kind of fuzz. There are moments that should manifest as crazy full-band rockouts to blow your pants off that just manage to slink by like an exhausted sigh. The experimental spoken word interludes are a swing and a miss, killing what momentum the album has with caustic tales of drug addiction, self harm, abuse, and all the ugliest parts of human nature. Listening to this album, it's hard not to hyperfocus on the negative. But underneath these glaring flaws lays some of the most vicious, visceral songwriting from one of the all-time greats.
"Last Days" blasts in the door with a condemnation of both the late stage capitalist hellscape we find ourselves in today as well as the punk scene: in the lyrics Pat calls out both himself and his fellow musicians for using their own anti-capitalist ideologies not to build a better world, but to escape inconveniences like awkward social interactions and rent collection visits from the landlord by being a drunk asshole who's on tour all the time.
"Gospel Music for the Coming Social War" contains probably the single most explosive verse of Pat's discography:
"If i ever drink again it's gonna kill me or I'm just gonna wish that it did
I swear to god I didn't quit shooting dope to watch border patrol pull this *** unopposed
the south side is a police state; not the type of thing I'd normally say
'cause I hate when our rhetoric exaggerates but where I'm from the police kidnap people every day
I swear to a God I never planned to believe in"
The song starts as an off-kilter polka and screams into a breakneck second half that weighs the desperate need for revolution against the crushing defeat that comes when you can't even meet your basic needs, a theme continued by albums like Jeff Rosenstock's POST- ("how can you solve all the problems around you when you can't even solve the ones in your head?").
"Exploration of Coercion in Everyday Life" rides the same four chords for its entire runtime, but by the time it climaxes in its anti-police refrain it feels like the most important thing in the world. Its verses call to attention the discrepancies between our society and a just one, as well as the things that keep us from Pat's brand of anarchist utopia: authoritarian law enforcement, financial ruin, and our own personal moral failures (although if you ask Pat it's mostly the cops).
"Song For Next May Day" is a rousing call to action: "we can't wait until we know we're not wrong to raise the stakes / we can't wait for someone else to write the songs that we'll sing on the barricades". "Last Song" wraps things up neatly. It acknowledges all the hurt and defeat the album just spent 25 minutes throwing in your face, but offers a way out, a path towards the light: that simple human kindness of solidarity and cooperation.
If we're going to claw our way out of these seemingly endless cycles; of late stage capitalism and the ever-widening wealth gap, of poverty, of drug addiction, of abuse; we're going to need a little help. In the context of his whole discography it's quite a touching message. After ending his first full-length recording with a song called "DIY Orgasms" that declared "who needs friends? Who needs love? I got me!", Pat leaves us with a message simple, understated, but all too true:
"there's a way out, but it's not on our own"
