“This is a very 2012 thing to say but the new Balance and Composure album is amazing. Very moody. Killer production. Kind of scratches an itch I thought I outgrew.”

The other week Megan sent me a message containing the sincerest form of flattery in the known universe: a request for music recommendations. Not only is it flattering in an affirmatory manner, a virtual pat on the back that calmly and gently reassures me as an arbiter of good taste, but it’s far more significant coming from her. Her liked songs on Spotify should play in the lobby of the United Nations. Any road trip we take is soundtracked by Caribbean disco; French new wave; Egyptian funk; and a bevy of other far-flung imports. (She doesn’t like Ethiopiques as much as I do, but nobody’s perfect.) She’s endlessly curious about discovery and for the most part, doesn’t retreat into a foxhole of comfortable nostalgia. For a guy who came up in the metal and punk scenes, where the people moving the genres forward seem to be relegated to the sidelines in favor of whatever album anniversary tour or emo night is coming to town this weekend, it’s a breath of fresh air. Megan knows ball.

It’s not my intention to completely besmirch nostalgia. Every person of a certain age has music or television shows or movies associated with fuzzy memories of their past. For some, it’s an occasional salve; for others, it seems to be a domineering personality trait. (How many dating app bios contain the phrase “looking for the Jim to my Pam?” I can say, anecdotally, far too many.) It’s normal and human, especially in unprecedented times like these, to retreat into the comfort and safety of art from whatever your coming of age era may have been. I just don’t find it particularly engaging anymore. As I get older I’m realizing that I want to be challenged, needled, and provoked by art instead of being comforted by it. Part of this philosophy is a visceral response to the endless trough of slop fed to us by American popular culture, with its remakes, reboots, reimaginings, covers, AI bullshit, algorithms et al. It’s also me just me being stubborn and wanting to buck what I perceive as a trend of becoming less curious with age. Nostalgia isn’t exciting and I get that not everyone wants excitement. But to me, all that stuff is noise. It’s content—not art.

“Kind of scratches an itch I thought I outgrew.”

Of course, humans are full of contradictions. It’s what makes us human. And though I sent Megan a bunch of albums that in my mind are new and provoking and challenging, I also sent her the new Balance and Composure album With You In Spirit. That sounds like a backhanded compliment but I promise it isn’t. This album—the band’s first in eight years—is a colossal comeback.

Balance and Composure are a band I’ve been in and out on over the years, but when I was in, as with their 2011 LP Separation, I was all the way in. Freshly single, living in downtown Orlando alone, going to college and working at a nightclub, I was in dire financial straits in 2011. Student loans—which are somehow still not canceled or forgiven—kept a roof over my head, but the payments always seemed to run dry before my wallet was ready. I was making eight dollars an hour at my job, plus the occasional small tipout, usually 20 or 40 bucks a shift. Truthfully, the biggest source of my income was loose cash customers would drunkenly drop on the floor, covered in spilled vodka sodas and other unidentifiable, possibly unspeakable liquids. I kept my eyes on that floor, not just out of self-preservation in a crowded room, but for cold, hard cash, gently kneeling down with a stack of a dozen or so empty glasses tucked into the bend of my arm to grab whatever I could find, even if it was just a dollar. On busier nights sometimes I’d end up with 80 bucks in “floor scores.” But it was never enough. Once I woke up, usually around 11 or noon after a night of 10-12 shots and maybe a post-work beer if I could swing it, I’d spend most of the day writing stories and reviews for Punknews, for free, or record reviews for Alternative Press, which paid not very much and not very quickly, before heading to work around 8. I paid my rent in cash whenever I finally had it all, never on time. Sometimes when things were really bad, friends would drop off canned food or box pasta from the back of their pantries and if I was lucky, cat food for my cats. “Going out” on my days off usually meant grabbing a 24 ounce can of Miller High Life from the 7-eleven down the street. Things were hard but I was happy.

In this time I’d grown close with a friend who lived a few hours away. It’d started off innocuously enough. She and I would text each other all day and night about anything and everything and nothing, just happy to be in each other’s presence and mind, if only virtually. We’d laugh and joke and argue and, eventually, yearn. Separation became “our” album. A bit on the nose, isn’t it.

“Listening to Separation again and thinking about you.”   

Platonic intimacy in friendships is, to me, non-negotiable. Writing about music online for so many years in my 20s and 30s, I got to meet a lot of people, most of them lovely, but the actual friendships yielded from that time have been awfully small and dwindling further as the years progress. But for those who’ve made it in, I love them hard, I make sure they know it, and I usually expect them to reciprocate. It hasn’t always been the best approach but it’s the only way I really know how to be a friend. Kids nowadays would call this a version of love bombing, to which I’d counter, well, there are worse things to be bombed with.   

I also know that in a male/female friendship that that intimacy has the potential to become something more—or confused for something more—which isn’t always what’s best. I do my best to be cognizant of the power dynamics evident in a society inherently laced with misogyny. But if you truly love somebody you’re friends with, I don’t know how productive it is to just bury it either, even if they don’t love you back, even if it might wreck the friendship temporarily or permanently. It can breed despair, lonesomeness, resentment, it can make you feel completely crazy. That’s not good for anyone. I spent the entirety of my childhood and early adulthood bottling up how I felt about everything and everyone. Now, I would always rather be vulnerable with someone I care about, who I know cares about me, than bottle it up to save face. It sometimes ends up messier that way, but to me, the juice is always worth the squeeze.

A wise man once said, “Love is the only real thing in the universe. This is very annoying because while it’s true, it’s also terminally cringe.” As I get older I realize how incredible love is, how great it is to love and be loved, even when it’s not totally 100% reciprocated or the right situation or time. The waves of euphoria and the recesses of despair, the messy thoughts, sometimes back to back. What a feeling. How stupid. And this was it. Wrong time, wrong place, too much distance, but it was love nonetheless. I was so deeply in love that sometimes at night I would feel physically ill from missing this person so much.   

Let's jump out a window

Maybe we could fly

Yeah, we talked a lot about it

But never tried

Cause I'll jump if you jump

Running out of time

If we don't go now

We'll never really find

It took a couple years, but eventually, things fizzled. Our relationship, if you can even call it that, became the fire pit in someone’s backyard at 4 a.m. when the host is just waiting for everyone to finally go home, flickering, still warm and occasionally crackling, but never to reignite. Wrong time, wrong place, too much distance. Neither of us were in a position to make the jump. Our relationship was never physical—we never even kissed—but it’s still one of the deepest, truest loves I’ve ever felt in my life. If anything, the lack of physicality made it all the more true to me. In the immediate aftermath a deep sadness came over me. In my mind, if she’d asked me to jump, I would’ve jumped, but it’s impossible to know how true that really was. It’s a moot point anyway. Love fades, new love emerges, and it’s never exactly the same but it’s wonderful nonetheless, and life goes on. I’m just grateful to have felt it at all, and eight years in, still feel it with Megan. Everything worked out the way it was supposed to work out.

Because Separation was such a nostalgic time and place album for me, and associated with a part of my life that felt unfulfilled, I didn’t really keep up with Balance and Composure after that. I may have listened to the two albums that came after it, 2013’s The Things We Think We’re Missing and 2016’s Light We Made, a few times each. Neither really grabbed me at the time, partially because of reasons stated above but also because my tastes were shifting away from this brand of angsty, brooding, post-hardcore, emo-adjacent rock music. Those two albums were also markedly different from Separation, which, while it had its quiet moments, was largely a mountain of riffs, walls and walls of loud guitars which is what I tend to value above nearly all else in the music I enjoy. I saw the band live at Union Transfer here in Philly in 2016 and recall initial excitement followed by a substantial letdown. They largely avoided Separation on the set list, though the place went nuts when “I Tore You Apart In My Head” closed the encore. Balance and Composure had creatively moved on and emotionally so had I. I sat in the back, at one of the tables near the bar, not paying super close attention to the band I used to love performing to an absolutely packed venue. 
  
When news emerged that Balance and Composure were reuniting and releasing a new album late last year, the news barely made a blip. I’d moved on. I was looking for challenging, provoking music and, no matter how great the songs were, I didn’t think I’d get that from a new Balance and Composure LP in the year of our lord 2024. With You In Spirit came and went, I listened once, and forgot about it. The album was quieter, moodier, more textured than the approach to Separation. It was well-made, the songs were strong, the production stellar, I just figured I’d outgrew it. But I kept coming back to it for reasons I couldn’t really place, and in the last month or so it’s all I’ve wanted to listen to. The song “Believe The Hype” in particular has been rattling around in my brain. I interpret the lyrics to be about a romantic situation the protagonist knows deep down isn’t going anywhere and never will, but is moving through it anyway, deluding themselves into believing in its potential as either a messy defense mechanism or a kernel of hope to hurriedly grasp onto, while also feeling anger and resentment at the way the other person is moving through the situation without thoughtfulness or care. The song’s first verse portrays anger, hurtfulness, and vindictiveness, but then the chorus flips the narrative back onto the protagonist, suggesting that it’s their own fault for being in this situation in the first place.

Today I thought about it all

And I think that you owe me a “Sorry”

Cough it up, yeah, make it count

I hope you feel so lost without me

All these thoughts, they boil up

I’m overflowing, yeah, I’m leaking

There’s nowhere safe to pour them out

'Cause no one knows me, I’m your secret

And I must be out of my mind

Fall for it every time

And I will (I will) until I die (Until I die)

I find solace in yearning for you now

And I mistake lust for passion

And I ride for pain

And I’ll believe the hype

I try to stay 'cause I still need this

It’s direct, engaging, and eminently relatable. We’ve all been in relationships or “situationships” where we feel cast aside and uncared for. Hell, maybe we were the ones doing the casting at some point as well. We may react in messy ways, but truthfully, we’re still in it, because the love is still there and even though deep down we know there’s no chance, we want there to be a chance. It’s really universal, effective songwriting.   

“I find solace in yearning for you now.”   

For better or worse, you could say I’m a lifelong yearner.   

⯁ ⯁ ⯁

Some things I read this week that I liked:
Augusta Koch on Philadelphia, underdog energy, and the power of imagination. Go birds.

Amber Rollo on her husband Matt Christman’s recovery and progress.

The YouTuber on a Mission to Trash My Book: Chapter One by author Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air, Into The Wild, etc.)

Yung Chomsky of the TrueAnon podcast remembers David Lynch.

There can only be one Hubie Brown, by Ray Ratto for Defector (paywalled)

Alice Fleerackers on why we ghost for Nautilus (paywalled)

This interview with Denzel Washington in the New York Times Magazine which includes this parable I’ll be thinking about for the next several years in all likelihood:

Last question for this time: What should I think about in preparation for when we talk again? Man goes down to the ocean and tries to fit all the knowledge of the ocean into his little brain instead of just jumping in the water and enjoying himself. Sometimes you just have to have faith in things bigger than our ability to understand them. Sometimes you have to just jump in the water and enjoy yourself and not try to figure it out.

This week’s songs I been thinking about: