RC@5: Morbid Stuff by PUP

Record Club covered this album exactly five years ago. I gave it another listen this week. Here are some thoughts.

Morbid Stuff

PUP

Week 12: April 21-27, 2019

I'm still undecided if these five-year retrospectives work better as a "what did I learn" exercise or as a "where is this band in my life now" exercise. Or both. Or neither. Or maybe probably definitely no one gives a shit about this and no one is reading. That's fine. I'm used to that. I'm more concerned whether people are still listening to Morbid Stuff anyway. Who gives a shit if they are reading about it, especially here.

But to speak to the former idea—whether I learned anything about music criticism in the five years since I wrote a review for this album—I'm comfortable in saying that this is one of the worst reviews I've written in the past 273 weeks. In the intervening half-decade, I learned a crucial lesson: you do not need to DIRECTLY relate to the details within the songs to still have access to the album EMOTIONALLY.

I claimed in April 2019 that I couldn't connect to this album because I wasn't sad in April 2019. That is fucking stupid. It's never about seeing your emotions reflected back at you; it should instead be about feeling something new. Whether I'm happy or sad or neutral, I can hear some of these blistering songs on Morbid Stuff and feel empowered by them, but PUP bashing away at guitars and Babcock's unhinged yelling and the constant running theme in this band of PUP being this machine perpetuated by an intense self-hate. It's all pretty thrilling. Depressing lyrics? Sure, but that was never the main point. The depression is a means to an end, and that end is shout-along punk rock. It doesn't matter one goddamn iota how I felt before I listened to the album. I mean, what the fuck. So dumb.

"Kids" is still a fucking banger, though. At least I got that right. I listen to that song a good amount, but it's been a hot minute since I listened to Morbid Stuff in full. That's the second point—what was the staying power of each Record Club album? It feels sometimes like each Album of the Week is the sun and the moon and the stars in my own personal galaxy during those five-ish days, and then I forget about them immediately. I don't want that to be the case. I want to remember all these albums—not necessarily fondly or whatever, but remember nonetheless.

I don't know if I feel that way about Morbid Stuff. It's not a bad album by any means (I'd probably only knock the grade down from 4 pukes to 3.5 pukes in retrospect), but it doesn't feel unique enough in the grand scope of things for me to be able to point to it and say "damn, that was a special one." This could be my fault, but it could be PUP's too—Morbid Stuff is already doubling down on the "PUP is an institution not long for this world because we hate everything" theme from a previous album, and a subsequent album would end up tripling down further. If this was my only run-in with this band, it might be different, but alas, I'm stuck with what amounts to just a really good fucking rock record. Pity me.

This could also be a symptom of our two-weeks-and-then-forgotten music culture. There are very few albums that stand the test of time and stay in the rotation more than like a month tops. So I get it. I wonder if the other reviewers that week (Nate, Sara, weekly captain Maeve) still listen to it, but if they are like me, the answer is probably "very occasionally if at all." But what I'm saying here is that Record Club is designed to prevent this from happening. Yes, we quickly forget about most art that we consume, but here is at least one album per week that has the potential to be something special and something long-lasting. And so maybe it's a bit disappointing that this really good album still doesn't seem all that special.