Midwest punks Why Bother? are strangely proud to be from Mason City, Iowa. Proud enough, in fact, to chronicle the small landlocked town's long, distressed, degeneration into despair and tortured alienation on their third LP A City of Unsolved Miseries. Maybe proud is the wrong word; morbidly fascinated may be more accurate. This dreary sonic diary humbly inscribed tomes from the vantage point of living in a world losing all sense of form, its contents bleeding irretrievably through its grasp, like rain through a colander. The four member's famously lo-fi, basement recording setup could not be better suited for etching out the definitions and textures that lend honest verisimilitude to tales of small-town crime, missing persons, and the ubiquitously lubricious cocktail of psychoactive pharmaceuticals and a draining lack of purpose that many are forced to imbibe every day. Notably, there is a distinct lack of judgment directed towards the subjects of these songs, and no measure of warmth is spared them; the tragedy is that no one can survive on good intentions alone, and a simple abstinence of condemnation does little to keep the blood pumping when tripping ones way through a blizzard of suffering. Still, a flicker of kindness, is a glimmer of hope, even if it is akin to a bic lighter serving as one's only means of survival while freezing in a meat locker overnight. Circling into view like a flying saucer on fire, opener "Lacerated Nights" spirals chaotically, shakily maintaining altitude as its systems spark and fail, an intentionally ominous greeting at the start of the album that perfectly illustrates the dynamics of Why Bother?'s sound; darkly personal post-punk memoirs and melodies, forced to forge ahead by a buzzy confluence of martian soundscans and grimy '70s Zero Boys hooks fished from the void. Despite the doubts their music entertains about the human condition, the group elects to leave us with the ponderous closing note of "Useless Time," where Terry the vocalist reaches out and through the distended threshold of a warped, wormhole of feedback to offer a proposition; if you and he are going to be forced, by habit and circumstance, to waste your lives, why not waste them together? Is time spent with another who understands you and your struggles in life ever truly wasted? Comradery cures many ailments, and upon such reflections, the group's name becomes less an open question, and more of an open challenge to the nihilism that lurks in the shadow of day and stalks openly in the gloom of night.
