Maybe you don't think Weekend at Bernies II is a great band name, but I'd like you to come up with something better for a project that is this deeply entrenched in the thrall of twinkly skramz. Pop culture references are kind of emo's thing. Plus it's referencing a movie about a dead guy... a beloved movie about a dead guy... and specifically a failed follow-up to a beloved movie about a dead guy. Are you getting how on-brand this is yet? I hope so because I'm not going to explain it any further. The band's self-titled EP sounds like it was recorded in a coffin buried the requisite six feet below a tombstone on a rainy afternoon. It plays like the last will and testament of the people who made it and the trapped angst that is expressed in the raspy shouts of the undermixed vocals that claw and scratch at the interior of the half-melodic guitars speak to the futility and inertness that defines adolescence. A torpor that most of us gradually habituate to with age as a survival strategy... and if you don't adapt to this slow decline... you die. Those are really your only options, adapt to misery or die. It is fitting then that the only other voices you hear on the record (and that don't sound like they are coming from someone who is actively being strangled) are clips from middle-brow TV comedies and morose teenage dramas. You have to find something to distract your brain from the agony of life and the acidic tedium that is its mortar and cable programming was that for many of us in our younger years. I guess kids today have Tik Tok to innoculate themselves against the cold boiling ennui and the callous burn of the quotidian. Someone should create a Tik Tok channel that just reenacts bits from
Workaholics and
The Adventures of Pete and Pete and works in quotes from 19th-century socialist pamphlets. It might help engender an alliance between Gen Y and Gen Z to build a better tomorrow. Maybe I'll do that someday. Or maybe I'll just watch TV.
