Unattached: SONG REVIEW: "Re-Do" - Modern Baseball

Song Review: "Re-Do" - Modern Baseball

For whatever reason, I feel like writing right now and have exhausted my default boredom activities like staring at the walls and watching paint dry. Expect these individual track reviews to occur more often around here. This is my take on the track "Re-Do" by Modern Baseball. 

Review: Emo as a genre has been given a bad name by the media and the general public, associating the term with whiny guys that wear too much make-up and write songs about problems that no emotionally competent person has enough trouble with to necessitate writing a song about them. These people failed to do their history. Emo, as a genre, is descended directly from hardcore punk in the Washington D.C area, which is about the least soft thing you can imagine. One of the most popular (and scary) 80s hardcore bands from L.A, Black Flag, was actually blacklisted by the LAPD and were watched by the law when on tour due to their destructive nature. Key members of the Emo movement played in Fugazi as well, who are regarded as one of the most essential (and not lame) hardcore/post-hardcore punk bands to have existed. On top of that, future declopers of emo started Minor Threat, who basically invented hardcore punk. Emo, or emocore, was formed by a bunch of hardcore punks who had feelings other than intense anger and frustration that they needed to get out on record. Pretty far cry from what the modern definition of emo. 

Modern Baseball, while not nearly as hardcore as the bands listed above, are nonetheless one of my favorite modern emo bands, and look about as emo as The Beach Boys. This is the opening track to their album Sports, which I consider to be one of the best modern emo records made since the genre largely discarded its hardcore punk influences for pop punk. This particular song leans more towards the pop punk side, but has lyrics regarding feeling out of place/scared of the future, and features a surprisingly good sense of humor throughout the song. 

The song opens with a short, quiet intro featuring some muted drums and a clean guitar before launching into the angry part. Singer Brendan Lukens' voice is piercing and emotive, perfect for the wordy, intelligent lyrics he delivers. There is a palpable anger in his voice when he sings "we're p*ssing away our time/'cause we're p*ssing away these beers" that makes you wonder if this chubby kid from Pennsylvania might have been the frontman of a hardcore punk band from L.A back in the day. The song swings through minor and major chord changes and the vocal melody follows the instruments, making for an incredibly catchy song that is also a ton of fun to sing along with. Don't let my talk about Black Flag and Minor Threat throw you off; even the casual pop listener could get down to this one. This is by far and away my favorite Modern Baseball song, and I strongly recommend that everybody hears it at least once.