The Menzingers
Everything I Ever Saw
EPITAPH<\/p>\n
In 2022, The Menzingers<\/a> celebrated the 10th anniversary of their seminal coming-of-age album On the Impossible Past with a reissue accompanied by a disc of acoustic demos, one of which was a stark reworking of \u201cSun Hotel.\u201d Hewing closer to the intimacy of the classic Leonard Cohen song<\/a> the original heavily borrowed from, the gentle rendition had the strange effect of bringing old memories into sharper focus. The Scranton band reliably came through with a new album, Some of It Was True<\/a>, the following year, and they keep up the pace with their eighth LP, Everything I Ever Saw, which invokes Cohen once again, recontextualizing the line \u201cI will remember you well at the Chelsea Hotel.\u201d Emphasis on \u201cwill\u201d: The Menzingers may forever be associated with pop-punk nostalgia, but they aren\u2019t interested in living in the past. Reliving it, as the title track suggests\u2014remembering everything in an ever more faithful, reassuring light\u2014is a different story.\u00a0<\/p>\n Consider the lyric that soon follows the Cohen interpolation: \u201cAll that is and all that never was \/ Don\u2019t mean shit to us now.\u201d It\u2019s from the song \u201cRomanticism,\u201d the album\u2019s emotional apex, one that\u2019s viscerally specific about the sorts of things it romanticizes, like hailing down a cab instead of opening the Uber app. The Menzingers aren\u2019t like other bands in the genre that seem stuck in perpetual adolescence, but as they\u2019ve wrestled with the end of each decade in their lives\u2014now their thirties\u2014their best songs do so with bleeding conviction you could mistake for teenage angst. On the single \u201cNobody\u2019s Heroes,\u201d entering the future seems literally impossible without strained vocal cords and crying out loud.<\/p>\n But the darker, messier songs on Everything I Ever Saw aren\u2019t wrought from a breakup\u2014they\u2019re about divorce. Thematically, the most interesting and distinct aspect of the record is the disparity between the life experiences co-frontmen Tom May and Greg Barnett are processing; while May got divorced, Barnet got married and had a child. But even tracks that store frantic, tightly wound feelings in the verses open up into comfortably anthemic choruses, some more wistful than others. One of the sadder ones is perhaps \u201cNobody\u2019s Heroes,\u201d which includes the line \u201cYou can always reinvent yourself.\u201d You can, but you don\u2019t always have to.\u00a0<\/p>\n Musically, The Menzingers have mostly stuck to their guns here, working with frequent collaborator Will Yip for crisp, dynamic production and hardly changing up their formula. There are softer songs to offset the shoutier ones, like the Wild Pink\u2013esque heartland rock of \u201cOther People\u2019s Money,\u201d whose satire of billionaires in space feels rather trite in 2026; \u201cGasoline & Matches,\u201d which adds a touch of synths, is more grounded and affecting. \u201cIt all blurs together and it barely makes sense \/ We were 16 once, we will never be again,\u201d from the opening \u201cChance Encounters,\u201d could have been lifted from practically any Menzingers record. On Everything I Ever Saw, they render it not as another shot of nostalgia, but a curious mix of relief and disbelief. We will never remember\u2014let alone be\u2014everything we once were, but it won\u2019t stop this band from repurposing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The MenzingersEverything I Ever SawEPITAPH In 2022, The Menzingers celebrated the 10th anniversary of their seminal coming-of-age album…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[178,180,179],"class_list":["post-244405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}