And, before we take a break tomorrow, a bit of apocalypse…
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[5.88]
Hannah Jocelyn: Laura does her thing, and it’s good! It’s not as life-affirming as “333” or the accompanying album Shape Shift With Me, which even LJG herself underrates. it doesn’t need to be, though; girl’s earned a breather. At a certain point, when the world is basically over, when something something 2030, maybe all that’s left to do is write an album of folk-rock with a song about Chicago being awful and a song about friendship are equally aggressive in their delivery. Don’t have “happy ever after”, just have “here and now.” There are few writers I’d rather hear document the end of the world as we know it, and few writers that can sum up the need for escapism that doesn’t lose touch with reality. “On top of the world/at the end of the world/with you” is a long way from the last time she ended a chorus with “with you.” Releasing an album under her own name, rather than her band name or deadname, makes sense. It’s time she had some time alone, and the lower stakes of the song (even if it’s literally about the apocalypse) are refreshing at a time when the stakes constantly feel so high in the real world.
[7]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: There’s a thin line between endearing scrappiness and sounding like your neighbor’s garage band collecting pity views at someone’s backyard BBQ.
[2]
Alfred Soto: She’s written two albums’ worth of the most lacerating self-appraisals of the last decade, and she still cuts through cliches. I find the strummed acoustic guitar arrangement rote after those releases, but it has the immediacy of journalism: no happy-ever-afters are possible for Laura Jean Grace, only a now she hopes is everlasting.
[7]
Micha Cavaseno: Midlife-crisis rock never felt so punk!
[2]
Taylor Alatorre: There is a point where noisily fretting about the end of the world can lapse into listless defeatism or a cheapening of present-day hardships. Laura Jane Grace sidesteps this hazard by couching her eschatological anxieties in practical, lived-in terms. She weaves fin de siécle laments into what is otherwise a conventional alt-country song about a fulfilling relationship, presenting us with an implicit question: is it worth it to get entangled in the vagaries of love and the trappings of domesticity when the ground is shifting beneath our feet? Her answer is the opposite of implicit: “don’t have ‘happy ever after,’ just have ‘here and now.'” It’s not for nothing that a song with this title is actually one of the happiest on Bought to Rot — this is a victory lap, however premature or short-lived, against the ever-present threat of paralysis.
[7]
Iain Mew: It sounds like 1991 (or 2000), but the disaffect fits perfectly to a sketch of a 2018 sentiment — when the world is burning inescapably enough, finding someone to enjoy it with feels like a victory.
[7]
Ian Mathers: I may have personally jumped fully on board the Against Me! train with New Wave (the first album, notably, where the “folk punk” tag didn’t really make sense anymore), but my brother played a lot of their earlier releases around our shared apartment, so if you hadn’t told me that here Laura Jane Grace dropped to a trio and swapped bassists I probably would have just assumed she was going back to earlier forms. Except, you know, with less raw-throated screaming and just a little bit of hard-won, resilient joy. It sounds good on her, and it’s certainly something I could stand hearing more of in 2019.
[7]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Great political art by virtue of not making any particular comment or prescription for our time save for gesturing upon the wasteland and saying “fuck it.”
[8]