Wil Wagner’s music shares plenty of similarities with typical blog rock stalwarts like Los Campesinos!, but he’s somehow found a way to ditch the kitsch, to purge his forerunners of their gimmicks and fill the void with sweaty, grinning sincerity. Both sonically and lyrically, ‘Throw Me in the River’ feels bolder and wiser than something like 2011’s crowd favourite ‘Sigourney Weaver’. This can be chalked up to Jonathan Low’s production—unlike previous releases, River sounds a lot like Low’s work with Restorations and more like the arena-sized rock these Aussies are fully capable of delivering.
But these tunes hurdle over the vague, fashionable soundscapes of fellow Low-mixed albums by the National and the War on Drugs. In fact, they occupy a refreshing, unfamiliar territory in between those bands and the work of the record’s producer, Jeff Rosenstock. It’s no surprise that Rosenstock would want to work with Smith Street, as the band’s wordy, witty self-deprecation is no far cry from the former BTMI! frontman’s lyrical output. Both songwriters can be awfully depressing without actually bumming us out—Bomb’s music makes chronic depression and functional alcoholism actually seem like a party at times.
While the album is by no means devoid of darkness—’Throw Me in the River’ being the emotional nadir—the record’s true constant is Wagner’s desire to find love, to find happiness in spite of his shit luck. On closer ‘I Love Life’, Wagner counters an earlier cry of “I don’t love anyone anymore” with “I love you so fucking much right now.” Songs like that and ‘I Don’t Wanna Die Anymore’ echo the triumphant riffage of the Menzingers at their best, but supplanting their drunken misery with something truly novel in its happiness.
What separates this band from everything else in the sad bastard corner of punk rock is, at the very root of his tears, Wagner’s contagious joy. Not only does he find himself on the precipice of happiness, he professes his budding hope as a conscious choice, a daily task to take seriously and to carry out loudly, with pride. “We’ll keep on through this shitstorm until the metaphors are literal,” he asserts on ‘The Arrogance of the Drunk Pedestrian’. While most bands in this sonic realm like to champion their dashed dreams, Wagner dares to dream on and fend off cynicism.
Lead single ‘Surrender’ assures the listener that “you don’t have to surrender if you don’t want to”—to depression, to cynicism, to the bad kind of drinking—to whichever bad habits make us into shitty adults. And that’s the heart of the record, the assertion that your own level of well being is a constant choice. River, as a whole, plays like a tailored, self-diagnosed antidepressant from Wagner to himself. He willingly vomits all of his troubles onto the table, then fingerpaints the mess into a map towards sanity. This album is a self-help book written for its own author.
DAVID SATTERWHITE