Review Summary: Eat more ice cream and spark more joy
with that she touches my temple and i tremble
i can’t breathe and i fall to my knees
my eyes are wide and projecting out on the street like a movie screen
with every scene, i feel the grief and all the pain
of every final thought that left a brain
i feel the weight of everyone
of all the sorrow
all the people who were never loved
I’ve never seen I The Mighty live.
Of course, neither have most people.* There’s a reason a band like this remains relegated to playing clubs in front of 200 people or opening for legacy alt-rock bands, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of their music, per se. No, the pertinent factors are nuanced and complex, comprising a convoluted causal chain, much like the reasons why I never saw ITM open for Anberlin and yet Connector became my co-album-of-the-year. Don’t worry, there’s a connection here. (;
you’re just a second away from being in love or alone
Carl Sagan once opined that if you’d like to bake an apple pie from scratch, you’d first have to invent the universe. And yet I suspect that it’s the creative impulse within all of us which endeavours to do just that, to craft beauty from chaos and construct meaning from stochastic happenstance. We’re all deeply narratival beings, aren’t we? Here’s my best attempt:
Last July found me standing outside of St. Andrew’s in Detroit with a friend, cowering beneath the warm summer rain whilst a band we’d never heard of opened for a sold-out crowd not a football field away. Three days before we’d been renting a surfboard and failing spectacularly to tame the tempestuous Pacific waves. Two days before we’d been arm in arm with 15,000 perfect strangers on the sands of Encinitas, drawn to Moonlight Beach like a magnet by our favourite childhood band. The day before we’d been hopping connecting flights from sunny Sandy Eggo to the Windy City to the big D. Now, we awaited the return of a sympathetic security guard, who’d listened to us plead our case about how StubHub had screwed us over, and Anberlin’s frontman had replied to our tweet about our plight (@christianmusic, hehe) and asked for our names, and we had the screenshots to prove it! Were we on the guest list now?? He’d promised to check with house staff as to whether any last-minute tickets could be procured. After a protracted wait, he returned with two tickets, promising to admit us into the venue after the opening band finished. We entered the venue with just enough time to procure merch before Anberlin took the stage. Since I’d missed ITM’s opening set, I queried their merch girl as to whether either of their albums were worth the money. “This one’s my favourite.” Sold! Just as the lights dimmed and (Debut) flooded the PA…
Connector didn’t leave my car stereo for two weeks.
some billion people of the earth
all fighting over dirt
i’ll trade my land for some bloodshed
how much are you worth?
some billion people of the earth
all fighting over church
searching for answers to questions
of such little importance
Every band’s got a howitzer of an opener, and Lady of Death plays her part most amiably, but it’s the pop-punk bliss of (now-disgraced) Brent Walsh’s catapulting melodies in The Lying Eyes of Miss Erray which take you by the waist, close the bedroom door, and seduce you ineluctably. You’re in love by the first kiss (and chorus!), and looking to lock that girl down by the time Adrift’s power bridge kicks in.
Side A of
Connector hits you like riding Millennium Force for the first time. Do you remember cresting that lift hill on your maiden voyage, confronted with the expansive vista of Lake Eerie before you and the stupefyingly
massive drop beneath you, convinced that surely it can’t really live up to its ostentatious hype...but then it does, and
then some? On
Connector, you’re screaming at the sky and flying at the speed of sound down the back of the first overbanked curve before you’re even Slow Dancing Forever. This record, my friends, is what the kids call a
banger.
Do you know what it feels like to fall in lust? Because that’s this record. Its crunchy riffs, vertiginous choruses, sincere lyricism, above all, its sublime
singability. Turns out my carpool karaoke ain’t quite commensurate with the task of producing a faithful facsimile of Brent’s pure, bold, elan, but I sure as
hell tried. It’s like The Feel Good Drag had a baby with Transatlanticism.
I remain unpersuaded that Friends and Andrew’s Song don’t constitute ITM’s attempts to iterate on the same song idea, but a little repetitiveness and cookie cutter song structures probably didn’t hurt the band’s stable of ready-made boisterous alternative radio singles. And it’s hard to hold a grudge, because perfect albums are a lie, and at this point you’re already smitten, and the final trio rules so hard anyways. (No) Faith in Fate’s simultaneously too clever for its own good and yet paradoxically, utterly sincere. I mean, Brent’s wails and the band’s power chords at the end don’t even evoke cliche (no easy feat when you’re belting “
maybe i’m just meant to be alone”!), that’s how well they pull it off. And Betrayal in the Watchtower? We’ll get to it, I promise, but I promised a connection, didn’t I....
maybe i’m just meant to be alone, and it’s just the world telling me so
used to have some faith in fate, now it’s something i can’t shake
tell me, is it true, that thing they say?
that good things come to those who wait?
but while i’m collecting dust, all the good ones get swept up
The drunk driver hit me doing 110 mph.
My car was totaled. I rode in an ambulance to the ER (no injuries!). I crashed, safely this time, at my friend Sarah’s apartment at 4:00 a.m., and subsequently texted and e-mailed everyone I knew to let them know how much I appreciated them. Then Covid hit, 2020 was canceled, and the multiverse upended. And so I did what any self-respecting, sane, socially adjusted individual would do in these
most unprecedented times...I downloaded Tinder.
I matched with a
ridiculously cute girl who’d just flown back from study abroad in Ghana, only to be quarantined in her house by the CDC. We texted nonstop for hours. We called. We Skyped. And then, not three weeks after my (and your) world changed forever, I embarked on the first date of my life. It was a beautiful day at a beautiful lake!
We embarked on myriad park adventures, balled in the backyard, luxuriated on the dock, hammocked, sought out many flowers, consumed copious quantities of fruit snacks and ice cream, flirted audaciously. I invited her over to my apartment (well, I gave her
options) to make her birthday fajitas and compete in Nerf Gun wars, and she challenged me to wrestle. I elected to cuddle instead. It was a most
lovely evening!** To that point, I'd endeavoured valiantly to remain outcome independent...but I remember laying in bed after she left, and feeling the most clarity I’d felt in years: I like this girl. Oh
God, I
like this girl.
And so I texted her and said I needed to see her again. Like,
tomorrow. She enthusiastically concurred...then she incurred a migraine. An ugly one, the worst of her life. She was incapacitated for the better part of a week, by which time I’d gone out of town. We finally reconvened alone over a week later to cavort in a pool and dog sit and traipse through a field at night in the countryside with heat lightning in the clouds above and clouds of lightning bugs surrounding us. Fantastic! We talked for hours into the night, and mutually decided that it didn’t make sense to date right now. And so that was that!
We ramped up our friendship in the last 50 days of summer nevertheless: tubing, trivia, paddle boarding, water balloon fights, day trips, chaco and taco Tuesdays, ice cream. Always,
always more ice cream! She’s off to college now. Two weeks ago today, I saw her for the Last Hang (of summer, that is!). She knitted me homemade pillows and wrote me the most
adorable note. I in turn gave her the only existing copy of my last volume of poetry, because how else could I properly convey my gratitude to her? And then I walked her to her car, posed for a selfie, hugged her tight, told her I couldn’t wait to see her again, and walked away. I held it together! I wish I’d hugged her a second time. As soon as I entered the apartment stairwell, I
definitely cried. Mostly happy tears! (:
I think life is like that. We make these connections every day. You never know when you’re going to fall in love, or in lust. You never know when you’re going to find your album of the year and favourite new band, only for the frontman to get hit with sexual assault allegations before you ever see them live. You never know when a global pandemic’s going to hit. You never know when you’re going to meet an incredible girl at
just the right time to spend a stupendously splendid summer with her, but
precisely the wrong time to date her. You never know when you’re going to see someone for the last time. You never know when you’re going to get hit by a drunk driver doing 110 mph.
To delineate the serendipitous confluence of events which led us hence necessitates something roughly analogous to the attributes traditionally ascribed to the tri-omni deity of the abrahamic tradition. It’s a farce, right? We haven’t the faintest conception of the impossibly intricate complexity of the reality we inhabit, the multitudes of connections which bind, far too expansive just to grasp. And yet we endeavour to do so nevertheless, don’t we? That’s who we
are, deeply narratival beings desperately longing for connections in a world we don’t understand, in a world wherein the stars in the observable universe utterly dwarf the grains of sand on the entire earth by orders of magnitude, wherein 7
billion fellow sentient beings you don’t know and never will live lives every bit as rich and deep and complex and meaningful as your own.
It’s the extra financial aid grant money which enables you to voyage to Sandy Eggo for the first time and see your favourite band in the midst of a hiatus, that decision to talk to the girl at the airport on your return flight who’s wearing your favourite band’s t-shirt, which leads to crashing with her and her friends at the next Sandy Eggo sojourn the following year, and her subsequently texting you two days later that Stephen Christian tweeted at you, after you’d already given up on attending his concert and gone to sleep, which thereby leads to the purchase of a random album and this review yet another year later. It’s the choice to return to college after flaming out epically as a freshman, the choice to persevere and graduate, the choice to take a promotion, the choice to ask that girl out, the choice to get back up after failing miserably over and over and over again and believe in a better world for yourself, the choice to go all in on a girl you may never experience the privilege of dating, the choice to come to peace with that fact and and concomitant decision not to care, and the choice to give her the girlfriend experience that she most indubitably deserves anyway. And all the butterflies affecting lives that we’ll never see!
if we could see the future with clarity
and nobody ever comes to save all of us from us
if we ever do arrive in the space where our souls reside
forever to love or burn
which one will you deserve?
does the answer hurt?
so we wait for a miracle once again…
Betrayal in the Watchtower strikes me as a fundamentally fractal (and chiastic!) experience, a 45-minute album encapsulated within a 6-minute closer. It’s equal parts mournful, melodious, brutal, poetic, raw, arrestingly beautiful. I’ve yet to meet another track so wholly optimized for air guitar! We end the album where we began, both 45 minutes ago and two albums ago (my understanding is that there’s a lyrical connective frame here with their older discography??). An epic epilogue as a prologue, indeed. It sparks prodigious joy.
Sometimes I don’t know if this album makes any sense on a meta level (much like this review? the universe? life??). What’s the connection here, the cohesive structure underlying the whole, the cogent narrative weaving together the disparate elements of a questioning life in the 21st century into something real, something true, something
whole? Do we see what we want to see, or is something really there, underneath the soaring falsettos and relational angst and naked power chords? And of late I just don’t care. Do you really need to understand how to bake an apple pie from scratch in order to crave another slice?
Millennium Force is an epic ride, much like
Connector, much like this summer, this year, this
life. When you’re on it, it’s a blur of chaotic ebullience, and then before you know it’s over and you’re re-orienting your reeling brain and endeavouring valiantly to make sense of it all. Was that it? Is it over? Can we ride again? Can we get the band back together again? Should I give that album yet another spin? Am I going to see her again? Is there one more delightful summer with an even more delightful girl yet to be had?
I don’t know. I don’t think anyone really does. But I
do know this:
I want another. Oh
God, I want another.
* Nor will they, given allegations which surfaced during the writing of this review!
** I wonder if she realizes that I never had any intention of seducing her that night?? If you're gonna kiss a girl named after a body of water for the first time, ya gotta do it properly! ;)
TL;DR: Don't overthink it, you know you want another slice of apple pie!
