Review Summary: The Future is Cancelled is a perfect punk album. Get it before it's not cool anymore
Captain, We're Sinking! is a punk band. They sound a lot like if The Menzingers had a baby with Hot Water Music and then added in terribly depressive, metaphorically dystopian lyrics about lives falling apart and general dissatisfaction.
The Future is Canceled is an album that defies pretty much everything it can be categorically described as: it is a punk album that is way too technical, a pop punk album that is just too impressive; there is a point in the second half of the album where a massive bridge seems like the only logical way the album could end, but then the next song comes back with an even bigger and more emotionally intense chorus and you begin to wonder if the album ever should end. CWS have found that elusive balance between melody, dissonance, and songwriting that only the greatest punk bands ever figure out, and seeing as this is only their debut it makes it all the more impressive. I could (and in previous drafts, did) go on and on about why a song like “Annina, We Will Miss You” undercuts the human condition so effortlessly while sounding like The Wonder Years finally making that perfect song they've been looking for, why a ballad like “A Bitter Divorce” is so huge and haunting that it makes most album closers seem like nonsense, but by the time you get to the part where CWS yell “Now Jesus Christ I'm not what you had in mind/ Jesus Christ don't cry/ I made a list of everything that I despise/ and I wrote your name down several times” no amount of me extolling the virtues of this record will matter. You will be in love with this little band from Scranton, and you'll be the one struggling to figure out what
The Future Is Cancelled means to you.
Now I see her writing on her skin with a ball point pen
She says "I'm dead, but goddamn I will rise again"
And she ate a hand full of pills
and washed them down with some Pepsi
Is it my time to be happy?
Is it my time to be happy?
