This Is How The World Ends by Badflower (2021)
Title:
Extremely appropriate for the year this was released in.
Album Art:
Simple shot of the band that I may be reading too much into, but the poses and the neutral uniformity of the clothing reads vaguely mental hospital or prison. If they did that on purpose that’s clever and I like it, if they didn’t I might need to get out more.
Overall:
I’m not sure if this is intended as a “true” concept album or not, but I feel like there is at least strong theme or point of view of the teenage male experience throughout the record. Adolescent hormones are a hell of a drug and this album is saturated with those intensified emotions of loneliness, rage, fear, anxiety, and self-consciousness. To put it bluntly this album is borderline uncomfortable to listen to, it really sounds like all the worst parts of being fifteen and credit to Badflower for getting that experience across so accurately. Let me provide a warning that I may be about to violently overuse the word “claustrophobia” in the course of this review because I just can’t come up with a better encapsulation of the album. Listening to this one front to back feels like the walls are closing in and your breathing’s getting too fast and like the world is spinning just a little too fast for you to be able to stand it. There’s definitely a heavy helping of teenage angst here, but it’s also worth remembering that this came out at the height of the COVID19 pandemic and I think some that global paranoia and hopelessness might’ve seeped into this recording. This is not the one to put on when you want to get the good vibes rolling.
Track By Track:
1. Adolescent Love
Something feels off about the timing on this track, there are a few sections that drag on and the intro takes a little too long to really get going. That being said, once it does find the gas pedal in the chorus it really redeems itself. I love how close the vocals sound to the mic in this song, especially on the softer humming sections that voice sounds about a millimetre from your earholes and that creepy-intimate sound really sets up the claustrophobic (drink!) edgy feeling of the rest of the album.
2. Fukboi
Fukboi is a jacked-up pop-punkish snark-fest that kind of sounds like Johnny Guilbert on bath salts. Like a lot of the songs on this record the lyrics are funny and self-aware enough to just border on obnoxious without falling all the way into unbearable – and we all know the kind of guy this is aimed at. You can’t help but move along to those drums and at the 2:25 mark we get our very first Josh Katz signature scream for this record.
3. Family
One to put on when you need to just lie on the floor and just feel your feels. The vocals are back to being right the hell up in your ear canals so you can really feel the angst coming through those lyrics – especially that “lost my fucking mind” sequence. I think this is one skates a little close to being overdone, but the self-awareness in the lyrics pull it back enough to avoid going Full Morrissey.
4. Johnny Wants To Fight
I have actually seen this band live, and let me tell you this one is a firecracker in person. The studio version here is still bursting with energy and one of my personal favourite tracks on the record. There’s so much emotional tension in this song that you feel it crackling just below the surface at every second during the verse before the pressure valve releases just a little into the choruses. Plus you get a great build up to the titular fight, and a unique guitar sound that I would describe as slithery or snake-like. The voicemail intro and outro where we learn who Johnny is and why he wants to fight gives this one a fun retro vibe, and unlike on some other songs the jerky start-stop disconnected-ness of the song sections works well here. If you want to experience the sonic equivalent of peeing on the electric fence, crank this one up.
5. Stalker
This isn’t even zero to one hundred, Stalker comes right the fuck out the gate dialed all the way up and never really gives you a chance to catch your breath. This is kind of the antithesis of Johnny Wants to Fight, in which you have a lot of disconnected elements working well together, in this one I can hear a lot of effects, that I like elsewhere on the record, not really coming together. It feels like its doing too much and that they’ve crammed so many different noises (for lack of a better word) into three and half minutes that they all end up fighting for your attention and it ends up a little headache-inducing. The lyrics are over-the-top-dollar-store- Eminem-sexism, I understand the effect they’re going for, but it’s a little too authentically obnoxious. I do enjoy Feminist Siri swooping in to take down sexism and the song does make sense in the context of the album’s concept, but I won’t be adding this one to my personal playlist.
6. Everyone’s An Asshole
I mean, fair enough. Track six brings extremely relatable lyrical content and a great drum build-up. This one gets in and gets out in three minutes exactly (with an interesting lullabye-esque outro) and avoids some of the timing issues that I have with a few of the other songs.
7. She Knows
She Knows is the kind of song that I think of a “free space” on a record like this. It’s a less intense and less oddly structured, which provides a nice little breather from the sonic onslaught of songs like Stalker. It might be dialed back a bit, but that does not mean it’s boring as we still get a mini drum solo and some very pretty vocals. The guitar outro sound on this one is very cool as well.
8. Only Love
Only Love opens up with a wickedly addictive bassline and the instrumentation really shines throughout this song. I don’t know if it’s a guitar or a synth doing this, but whatever is making that fizzy sound is so cool. I want to keep listening so I can pin down what that is.
9. Sasshole
That percussive guitar intro is so unexpectedly funky, it’s awesome and I loved hearing every time it came back throughout the song – I kind of wish it came back a few more times. Other than that guitar sound, this one isn’t my favourite track on the record. The making-fun-of-rockstar-tropes lyrical theme is funny, but Don’t Hate Me does it better and that “uh oh” section drags on just a second or two too long.
10. Don’t Hate Me
The title is supremely ironic because our narrator is practically begging the listener to hate him on every other track on the record. Like Sasshole, this one pokes fun at some of the classic angsty-rocker standards and I think this one does it better. Aside from the fact that “depression makes no exceptions except the rich and sexy” is a really funny line on a number of levels, this song also manages to come off both sarcastic and deeply honest at the same time. To cap off one of my personal favourite tracks, Don’t Hate Me also provides the best Signature Josh Katz Scream on the album.
11. Tethered
Oh, this one hurts. Just listen to the way Katz sings through “young” here and tell me you don’t feel that right down in your chest. There is so much sincerity in these vocals and the instrumentation is pared back a little bit to really let them shine. I love the drums on this track too, that intense attack from drummer Anthony Sonetti sounds like fists pounding desperately on a loved one’s door and praying you’ll get to them before it’s too late.
12. Machine Gun
On the scale of Songs About US Social Issues this one ranks higher than Everyone’s An Asshole. The lyrics deal with gun culture, military culture, and a critique of the American state as a whole and they do so very effectively. Even for us non-Americans this feels very relatable and captures the loss of faith in governments that so many of us experienced at the height of the pandemic. This is also the closest thing this album has to a title track with the “this is how the world ends” chorus. Pulling back the music to leave just that stark vocal works very well.
13. My Funeral
My Funeral rounds off the record with a cutting cynicism (the lyric about funeral bandwagon-ing is particularly razor-sharp) and a surprisingly hopeful ending. There’s just a little light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel lifted quality to the instrumentation right at the end that feels like the right way to leave off. Maybe our narrator is growing up a little and beginning to realize that life does not actually end when you hit your twenties.