Review Summary: Philadelphia's finest say farewell to pop-punk, and hello to the album of their career...
More than hot summers, hot sex and hot pizza, the dominant theme of pop-punk has always been what it means to grow the *** up. No band has diarised this process quite like The Wonder Years, Their last three albums even formed a trilogy about that very subject - each one charting the people, places and events that were incrementally changing them. it's been remarkable hearing the leap from Juvenilia like Let's Moshercise!!! on 2007's Get Stoked On It! to the quater-life-crisis anthems of 2013's The Greatest Generation, Yes, the kids who once wrote about deciphering Jimmy Eat World lyrics grew into a band whose own music demands deliberation. And never more so than on No Closer To Heaven.
Warning: there are no pop-punk, sugar rushes here. This is a collection of dark, thoroughly wounded-sounding songs, On Cardinals singer Dan 'Soupy' Campbell scolds himself for failing a friend with it's beautiful choirlike refrain 'We're no saviours, if we can't save our brothers'. Before long it's America's turn in the crosshairs. On Stained Glass Ceilings, an incendiary guest spot sees letlive.'s Jason Aalon Butler chastise the U.S. for it's slave history, screaming 'Three-fifths a man makes half of me,' Throughout, then Soupy comes across a man whose moral compass is pointing due north in a world where everything else is broken. No wonder he spends time identifying with fallen heroes - which in the case of A Song For Ernest Hemingway, involves fantasising what it's like to give up and 'destroy anything worth chasing'. Dude Ranch this is not, more like Deja Entendu.
More than anything, No Closer To Heaven's an album of piercing stories. I Wanted So Badly To Be Brave describes a blood brother pact being sealed, before one of them heads home to face a father who will toss him 'room to room'. The Bluest Things On Earth while obviously taking notes from the Parker Cannon book of song names, creates powerful images with simple descriptions like 'Found you shaking at the lake / A hospital bracelet still tight to your wrist'. It's Cigarettes & Saints though, that cuts deepest as it describes a friends funeral. It's a tough listen hearing Soupy - someone who's critiqued organised religion on record before, and even on this very song - still acknowledge, 'I lit you a candle in every cathedral across Europe,' in fact it's heartbreaking.
This is an album that is born under the realisation that they had reached the top of the pop punk ladder and instead of trying to top that and fall off, they have sidestepped onto another ladder one that digs further down, but conversely has more scope, ambition and a possibility to reach the clouds. The Wonder Years are stepping away from the trilogy that ruled pop-punk, songs about friendships, cold winters and hot summers and erupting a new chapter, where darkness swallows the diners and snow covered streets of Philadelphia's suburbs. But make no mistake: The Wonder Years are still all the things you loved intelligent, soulful, catchy. Hell, the 'If I could manage not to *** this up,' chorus of I Don't Like Who I Was Then is as catchy as anything they've written. But now there's more to admire. No album shows of their brilliant musicianship - all those wonderful background textures - or lyrics like this. Here, The Wonder Years have grown into the rarest of bands: one whose meanings accumulate between songs. Look no further than the title track, as Hemingway reappears, only this time around Soupy's no longer identifying with literature's most famous suicide, This time he's determined he 'won't meet the same fate'. That's the beauty of The Wonder Years the closer you listen the more you'll hear. And there's so, so much to hear this time around.
