Review: The Menzingers – Some Of It Was True

The Philadelphia-based punk rockers, The Menzingers, are showing no signs of slowing down on their great seventh studio album called Some Of It Was True. Produced by Brad Cook (Bon Iver, the War on Drugs, Waxahatchee), the album feels as reinvigorated as the band themselves, and highlights the band’s songwriting improvements from moving away from more introspective songs to more worldly issues that affect the lives of everyone around us. While their last record, Hello Exile, was drenched in the cloud of COVID quarantines, Some Of It Was True finds The Menzingers reaching outside of their usual comfort zone of writing by expanding upon the ideas they’ve tinkered with over their storied career, and quite possibly, creating their most fully-realized work of art to date. This album was recorded at the legendary Sonic Ranch in the heart of El Paso, Texas, and this foursome utilized the strengths of producer Brad Cook to create a record that not only moves the needle of creativity further down the line for The Menzingers, but also makes for an ultra-memorable statement as one of the best albums of 2023.

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Review: The Menzingers – On the Impossible Past

On the Impossible Past

I’ll never forget the first time I heard On the Impossible Past. I had a copy from a friend who told me for months to check out The Menzingers and that this album would blow my mind. I was in my car getting ready to head to work, when I finally decided to fire up the record on my iPod. At the time I was 23, I was in my first year out of college, working a job I hated and was missing the great times I was having with friends months earlier. As I put the car in drive, the words “I’ve been having a horrible time, pulling myself together,” spilled out of my speakers and time stopped. “Good Things” immediately wowed me and all I could do was turn up volume up. 

On that drive to work, I never made it past “Burn After Writing.” I kept going back to “Good Things” and repeatedly listened to the opening two tracks bleed into each other. It wasn’t until my ride home where I discovered “The Obituaries” and what the rest of the album had to offer. Listening to On the Impossible Past in full for the first time was truly an out of body experience for me. The storytelling by singer/guitarist Greg Barnett and singer/guitarist Tom May swept me off to a different world that took place years ago; I was getting drunk in the back of a Lions Club, I was getting drunk with Casey before I did dishes and then I walked home single, seeing double. 

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Review: The Menzingers – From Exile

The Menzingers - From Exile

We’ve been having a horrible time… in 2020. COVID-19 has forced us to keep our distance from one another and has caused unimaginable pain to millions around the world. Millions are out of work. Bands can’t play concerts and tour around the world like they usually do, forcing them to find new ways to get in front of their fans. The Menzingers came into 2020 with plans to tour their new album, Hello Exile, which was released last October. Instead, they canceled all future tour dates when everything shut down in March.

The Menzingers decided to flex their creative muscles and make the most of their time away from each other in quarantine. Between mid-March and June, the band re-recorded Hello Exile while they were all in different locations. Their goal was to create something like the acoustic demos that appeared on the excellent On The Possible Past, but instead they decided to add to the depths of the songs and not just strip them back.  

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Review: The Menzingers – Chamberlain Waits

Chamberlain Waits

The Menzingers released their second album, Chamberlain Waits a decade ago, and what a decade it’s been for them. It was an album that would build the foundation for a small town Pennsylvania-rooted band that would go on to consistently pack venues with fans all over the world.

Chamberlain Waits represents The Menzingers on the cusp of pulling off something truly special. While 2012’s On the Impossible Past is the staple Menzingers album (with After the Party in a close second place), Chamberlain Waits had all of the ingredients of what makes the Menzingers great; Relatable lyrics that set a scene in your head, catchy choruses that make you want to scream them at the top of your lungs and guitar riffs that will hook you in immediately.

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Review: The Menzingers – Hello Exile

The-Menzingers-Hello-Exile

The last time we heard from The Menzingers, they were fretting over getting older. “Where we gonna go now that our twenties are over?” frontman Greg Barnett asked repeatedly on “Tellin’ Lies,” the opening track from 2017’s After the Party. If that album had ended with its title track, Barnett would have had his answer (and the band could have feasibly had their happy ending). “After the party, it’s me and you.” The record proved to be a growing-up narrative that culminated in a love story—or so it seemed. But the last song on that record was actually “Livin’ Ain’t Easy,” where life was likened to a continental breakfast where they’re always out of coffee.

Hello Exile is essentially that line blown up into a widescreen, cinematic experience. The party is way past over, and so are your twenties. This time, youth and young adulthood have been replaced by the next chapter, and it’s one where things don’t seem quite as black and white as they used to. “How do I steer my early 30s?/Before I shipwreck, before I’m 40?/ Ain’t it a shame what we choose to ignore/What kind of monsters did our parents vote for?” Those are some of the first lines that Barnett sings on “America (You’re Freaking Me Out),” Hello Exile’s disillusioned opening track. A lot of this record is about trying to pretend that you’re younger than you are, or trying to get back to those golden days of youth—back when you had no cares or responsibilities. Right off the bat, though, “America” tips the record’s hand, because how can you get back to that place of innocence when the whole nation seems to be going to hell? Later, on the terrific “Strain Your Memory,” Barnett pines after a girl with a simple proposition: “Can you strain your memory back to the times/When trouble wasn’t always on our minds?” It’s a nice thought, but it’s not always that easy.

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Review: The Menzingers – After the Party

The Menzingers

Over the first ten years of their life, The Menzingers have never shied away from their boozy reputation. Numerous mentions of alcohol – the good and the bad – are littered throughout the Philadelphia band’s first four albums. Which makes the band’s new album, After The Party, so profound – we already know what happens during the party but what happens after, once all the confetti’s been swept up, the beer’s gone flat, and music turned down? After The Party explores the themes of getting older and bridging the gap between a carefree spirit to a more responsible partner while still trying to escape the mundanity of everyday life.

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Review: The Menzingers – After the Party

The Menzingers

This first impression was originally posted as a live blog for supporters in our forums on January 9th, 2017. First impressions are meant to be quick, fun, initial impressions on an album or release as I listen to it for the first time. It’s a running commentary written while listening to an album — not a review. More like a diary of thoughts. This post has been lightly edited for structure and flow.

Finally!

I’m been embargoed on this sucker for what feels like forever and been aching to talk about it. And, with the last few weeks being a big move to get Chorus set up to work better with a version system (cleaning up my Git workflow and deployment) and working on a new Supporter Page (streamlining and creating a much better page for those that don’t wanna be a forum member to sign up), I’ve been itching to talk about music again. Always a needed distraction from some of the horrors going on basically everywhere else these days.

So, things are crossed off the ‘ol todolist and I’m ready to dive into what is sure to be a favorite of 2017.

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Review: The Menzingers – Rented World

The Menzingers - Rented World

LP4 is a huge hurdle for The Menzingers. Whenever a band goes up against themselves, it’s an enormous test of their staying power and ability to grow within their own sound. The popularity and cult-like adoration surrounding 2012’s On The Impossible Past makes it obvious that The Menzingers are The Menzingers’ biggest competitors when it comes to Rented World, as the questions surrounding this release view it pointedly as a “follow-up,” and whether that follow-up could possibly meet lofty expectations. 

This is fair and unfair for the Scranton, PA quartet. When I reviewed Transit’s Young New England, and completely trashed that album, I wrote that the band had set a standard for excellence in the past – a standard that I held them to with their new work. The Menzingers are in exactly the same boat. At the same time, it’s daunting to give an encore to an album as holistically spectacular and sweeping in nature as the Americana-tinged, story-telling punk rock that Impossible Past offered us; as vocalist and guitarist Greg Barnett explained to Exclaim! Magazine, “…when we first started writing, even the first note, it was like, ’Oh, where do we start?’” [Italics added for emphasis.]

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Review: The Menzingers – On the Impossible Past

The Menzingers - On The Impossible Past

I’ve been having a horrible time
Pulling myself together.
I’ve been closing my eyes to find
The old familiar failures.
I’ve been closing my eyes to find
Why all good things should fall apart.

So begins The Menzingersʼ latest record, the sweeping, driven, masterful On the Impossible Past. Those lyrics come from the opening (and essentially introductory) “Good Things,” a short song that starts calm before the guitars and vocals tumble into an avalanche of power. As we have come to expect from the band, which is following the phenomenal Chamberlain Waits, anthemic sing-alongs provide a vessel for thought-provoking lyrics.

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Review: The Menzingers – Chamberlain Waits

Chamberlain Waits

The 2010 comedy Date Night is about a couple’s wild journey into the city one evening where they continually run into obstacle after obstacle, essentially postponing their night of innocent fun and reigniting their love in the process. The 1977 comedy The Out-of-Towners contains a similar plot, however this time around, the couple are trying to survive the manic big city while sightseeing, eventually running into a slew of wacky characters all while reigniting their love in the process. Not quite the same, but enough for a viewer of both to notice the similarities.

The same idea can often apply to music. Despite the makeup of different individuals from different backgrounds, influence always tends to seep its way into just about any band’s music. It can be a positive and a negative. Positive, because it’s easy to relate to through familiarity; negative, because it can be skewed as plagiarism. The Menzingers are certainly not being accused of blatantly ripping anyone off, but on their sophomore release, Chamberlain Waits, the influences come up frequently, and it takes a bit of the sheen off the previous buzz that has been circulating over the band for the past year or two.

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