A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings

If you're familiar with any Beach Slang song, you've pretty much already heard A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings. That's kind of the point of Beach Slang. James Alex speaks almost exclusively of being young, loud, and wild to reacquaint listeners with the dormant emotions they once felt were inextricable from formative moments: discovering the Replacements, playing in a high school band, making out on the filthy couch at your first punk rock show. He yells lyrics like, "The radio is loud and wild, but I'm too drunk to spin the dial,” one of the more *subtle *nods to the ’Mats. Meanwhile, the main riff of “Spin the Dial” is an almost verbatim recall of their own song “Punk or Lust.” It too has a glorious, defiant chorus that shouts down every impulse to think critically about a record called *A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings. *

This balance between my brain and my heart has been ongoing since Beach Slang’s debut single, “Filthy Luck.” It was one of modern indie rock’s most impressive declarations of intent and the resulting 2014 EP Who Would Ever Want Anything So Broken? was so fully-formed, it threatened to make any subsequent Beach Slang music redundant. They quickly turned out a darker, more diverse rendering of their pub-rock sound later that year with Cheap Thrills on a Dead End Street*, *and the exact same pattern is playing out with Beach Slang’s LPs. A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings follows the urgency and coherence of The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us by pushing Beach Slang towards opposite extremes: “Atom Bomb” and “Wasted Daze of Youth” are frenetic and chaotic ragers that stop short of expressing the actual rage that may have went into them. “All Fuzzed Out” is the template for the best songs here, the ones that are slower, longer and surprisingly autumnal. It taps into shoegaze and New Romantic influences that seem unexpected but were nonetheless telegraphed on their mixtape of cover songs.

But for all of their attempts to slightly expand their reach, Beach Slang’s blinkered perspective continues to draw a thick line around those who love this kind of rock‘n’roll and those who have no interest whatsoever. While Alex’s unyielding earnestness is a major part of their appeal, it’s also the most divisive aspect of Beach Slang and the mere decision to call this album *A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings—*even if it is earned—calls into question whether he’s truly operating without pretense. And if there’s even a sliver of doubt about it, Beach Slang are basically unlistenable.

Though Alex claims he’s telling the stories of his fans on *A Loud Bash, *the ones from “Young Hearts,” “Wasted Daze of Youth” and “Future Mixtape for the Art Kids” sure sound like his own stories told on “Young & Alive,” “Ride the Wild Haze” and “Bad Art and Weirdo Ideas.” Alex recently opened up about the deep adolescent trauma and abandonment issues at the root of “Punks in a Disco Bar,” but the lyrics barely hint at it. Despite Alex’s claims that his shoot-first songwriting style holds nothing back, it may actually have the opposite effect.

Yet, the impulse to question Alex’s sincerity is necessary to create an environment in which Beach Slang can thrive. Similar over-the-top acts like PUP and Pkew Pkew Pkew contrast their anthemic punk rock with an abject lyrical misery that makes it clear their shitty circumstances are a direct result of loving anthemic punk rock too much. But Beach Slang are incurable romantics and when their best songs hit their mark, as many of them do here, other forms of music seem woefully non-committal. This stuff isn’t just on the nose; the effect is more like what Prodigy described on “Shook Ones, Pt. 2”: “Rock you in ya’ face/Stab your brain with your nose bone.” Of course, that can only happen so much before you become numb to it. For all of its subtle improvements, the choruses don’t quite soar as high on A Loud Bash as before. And while their triumphant debut ended with “Dirty Lights,” perhaps the best song Beach Slang has ever written, this album’s closer “Warpaint” is almost certainly their worst, a “Save Your Generation” pastiche that confirms the wisdom of keeping Alex’s vocals lower in the mix throughout the record.

After all, it's difficult to resist the impulse to be embarrassed on Alex's behalf. In recent interviews, Alex name-checked John Hughes, Kerouac, and Bukowski as writing influences—a 42-year old man completely unaware that those three are often used as fodder for jokes about try-hard high school boyfriends. And yet, none of them really loom over A Loud Bash: there are none of the *Pretty in Pink *tropes that have sustained syncable faux-indie pop for decades, none of the misanthropic navel-gazing of Kerouac—and Alex certainly doesn’t share Bukowski’s attitudes towards women. Yes, there’s a song called “Hot Tramps,” but it’s likely a Guided By Voices homage. It contains one of Alex’s most genius lines: “Your arms are like a car crash I want to die in.”

For all of their punk rock advocacy, Beach Slang are really just an atypical twee band—how else to describe their glorification of clumsy, endearing adolescence? Everything about them should make a cynical music consumer wince: Alex getting onstage looking like Angus Young on prom night and yelling, “We’re here to punch you right in the heart!” and reading fan poetry and covering the most well-known songs of his most obvious influences. It’s certainly curative for Alex, being able to relive the best parts of his teen years without having to endure the abuse and loneliness. And there’s a poignancy to Beach Slang that courses through every second of A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings that explains why they might even be necessary: It works best as group therapy, a 30-minute reprieve from the pervasive judgment of adulthood. Is that lifestyle really sustainable or really any way to truly live? Here’s the first chorus on the album: “I hope I never die.” Simply believe that James Alex believes it and you might, too.