The Albums That Matter: You're Gonna Miss It All

Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE. Obviously, You're Gonna Miss It All does not fall in line alphabetically, but as previously explained, I'm also using this column to talk about the best albums of the 2010s. This is the next album I am discussing. Come back in December to find out where it falls in the rankings.

You're Gonna Miss It All

Modern Baseball

2014

The least important aspect of this album is that it is accessible emo via pop-punk. This means that it's as fun as, say, classic Blink-182. Listen to "Your Graduation," the band's most popular song; when that climax hits with a drum roll and a guitar solo, it's cathartic. Or the tasty pop chorus of "Charlie Black." Or the emphatic statement of "to hell with the spins, I'm staying!" that turns into a rallying cry on "Rock Bottom." Etc. Etc. But the album is unabashedly "emo" in the sense that the lyrics are dark and self-deprecating and, well, emotional.

The most important aspect of this album is that I, as the listener in this case, can see myself in all of these lyrics. Or, at the very least, a previous version of myself, the "teenage Joe" so often alluded to on this blog. Yeah man, he felt this shit. When, in "The Old Gospel Choir," the pronouns switch to throw the barbs as the self, the classic suicide-by-words of "I'm not smart, just a prick / in the fingers and the toes of all of those who show interest in me," for me, that was like... yeah, I remember feeling that way.

To be very clear, save for maybe the first four months of this decade, I haven't felt this version of self-hate for the entirety of the '10s. I don't feel anything like "Hey, why did I do that? / I make everything collapse" ("Broken Cash Machine"). These are feelings I've long since let go of, or buried. This is pure adolescent emo fuel. When you're 20 years old and you don't know what the fuck you are doing or how anyone could ever love you—those types of feelings. Modern Baseball unearths it all here. You're Gonna Miss It All isn't a mirror of me now; it's more like reading through a diary and thinking, holy shit, I remember this feeling, this hurt.

And when you're going through that shit as a youngin', you hope that it eventually ends, that you eventually find happiness. And then you do. And you think that you'll never look back, that you can't possibly find anything useless in the wreckage of the pain you used to feel, all the loneliness and lack of confidence. You might think that that part of your life is long gone. But then you listen to Modern Baseball, and you realize that you're gonna miss it all.

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If this album sounds interesting, try this song: "Apartment"

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Stray Observations

• Modern Baseball is on indefinite hiatus, mostly due to co-frontman Brendan Lukens' mental health issues. Look, it's definitely clear that there are depression concerns in some of the lyrics here that go a little over-the-top. I mean, the vitriol directed at self and at others in some of these songs, all the lyrics written by Lukens, they betray some concerns that I'm really glad he's addressing, instead of pushing past the limit and continuing a band when he can't function. I wish him well. My question at this point, from an audience's perspective, is: can we enjoy the songs still when we know how painful they were to write and experience? I'd argue yes. There's empathy to be found here. Lukens spoke his truth, even if it's hard not to flinch when you see that truth out in the open.
• Lukens and co-frontman Jake Ewald are fucking wordsmiths when it comes to put-downs (again, directed equally at themselves and at others). My favorite description on the album is "My untamed hormonal Loch Ness shitshow" from "Notes," but there are plenty of other honorable mentions.
• I also really enjoy the admittance that the protagonist is "Caught between my adolescent safety net / and where the world wants me to be" on "Going to Bed Now," and it's probably the one line on this entire album that an older Joe could relate to. For millennials, that feeling lasts well until your mid-20s sometimes. (I didn't feel like my adolescent safety net completely until I left my parents' phone plan only like two years ago.)
• Two of the twelve songs slow it down from the frenetic pop-punk-emo of the majority of the album, and they are definitely the two worst songs on the album. "Timmy Bowers" is an unnecessary reprise of "Charlie Black" (and I have no idea why those songs are named that). "Pothole" is redeemed by the fact that the lyrics are very pretty and vivid... but it's still kind of a slog.
• ALBUM COVER: I don't know. I usually don't spend more than three minutes of research for this recurring bullet point. Here's what I found out in the most recent three minutes: the photo is credited to a Craig Donatucci. On AllMusic, this is Craig Donatucci's only credit. Google tells me that the most famous Craig Donatucci is a well-known urologist. The photo itself, I have to assume, is a band member as a child, those it's possible that it's a generic b/w photo of random people. "You're Gonna Miss It All" implies nostalgia, but the time period you feel nostalgia for depends on how old you currently are, I guess.
• The "folding napkins" line on "Broken Cash Machine" was the line that stood out to me on the very first listen because of how striking the memory was of folding thousands of napkins at my old job. Nostalgia is strong in specificity.
• Another Philly band! Ewald went to Drexel, and Lukens went to Chestnut Hill, but they both left school to pursue music full-time.

NEXT TIME: Bat Fangs by Bat Fangs