It’s been nine years since the last Lagwagon full-length, but the punk outfit’s new set, Hang isn’t interested in being weighed down by the passage of time. In fact, Hang feels like a perfect follow-up to Resolve. That album had brought the band’s focused and bright mid-’90s sound to its most refined point. Before Resolve, Blaze had stretched out into power-pop and other tangents outside of pure pop-punk. Now, Hang is a dark counterpoint to the brightness of Blaze and a raucous breaking of the borders Resolve thrived in.
Hang makes clear that Lagwagon came back with something to say. It’s an album both about how we cope with loss or confusion or disenfranchisement. These songs are as fascinated with the ways in which we deal as it is in the ways in which we avoid. “Reign” starts with frustration. “Fuck this, I’m done, I can’t win,” Joey Cape shouts when the song bursts to life. “While you’re leaving, the rest of us will be here grieving,” he sings later, separating the justification for retaliation or ignorance from the need to understand what has happened. The song makes reference to ideology and religion, so it has clear political implications, but you can also feel a more personal relationship to this, the ways in which people avoid or deal with loss everyday.
The songs, especially in the first half, do feel politically charged on their surface. “The Cog in the Machine” and “Made of Broken Parts” both sing of people who may be crushed by much larger forces. Where tons of punk bands sing about the machine, though, Lagwagon’s focus is on the cog, on the individual. For the individual, the album suggests, we have all manner of ways to hang. It can be from a rope. It can be to hang in there and survive. It can be to get with the program. We can get caught up in capitalist expectation (“Western Settlements”), or give in to social norms of suburban households (“Burning Out in Style”), or we can let that machine steamroll us.
But that machine is not always some moustache-twisting villain. Sometimes, and often on Hang, it’s a personal grief that’s hard to face. Cape and the band pay tribute to late No Use For a Name frontman Tony Sly on “One More Song”, a bittersweet song that both pays tribute to a lost friend and recognizes the limitations of putting personal grief to song. The same line of thought comes up in different context in “Burning Out in Style”. “I’m not getting through to you in a song,” he sings late in that track, highlighting the curious tension of this record. The only word used more than “hang” on this record is “empathy.” Lagwagon has created a complex look at the ways in which we come to understand both ourselves and those around us. Music and other spaces for introspection help, but they can’t always link us together the way we’d like. Sometimes the very thing that keeps us from moving on, even as the machine keeps chugging, can be ourselves. It’s not so much a call to admission as it is a call to perseverance to understanding over reaction.
Much has been made of the ways in which Hang resembles older Lagwagon records in sound. It especially may, at first blush, hearken back to the more metal-informed riffs on Duh and Trashed. This reading of the album sells short the ways in which Lagwagon has constantly shifted over its long discography. But it also may miss the point. With a set of songs so caught up in moving forward, in understanding a (personal and collective) past and reconciling with it, the music seems to do similar work. This isn’t a retreat back into old sounds that works, it’s a refashioning. Nowhere is this clearer than on the ambitious “Obsolete Absolute”. The song, like so many here, coats itself in shadow. The opening bass carves out space in a way the band hasn’t before. If the riff that follows charges like past riffs, it also tightens them up into something new and fresh. These hooks can churn and brood, but they also maintain a propulsion the band has been long honing over many albums. “Obsolete Absolute” also marks the kinds of sonic and tonal shifts that make Hang work so well. If these songs are informed by the band’s past work, it is also aware of finding its own ground. When it doesn’t distort or reshape the sonic past, it fitfully pulls free of it.
Hang is another impressively complex and yet tuneful turn from Lagwagon, a band that has long been one of the most surprising punk acts working. It may sometimes double-down on the darkness to convince us of its seriousness, but Hang is such a carefully wrought, complex look at grieving and disconnection that it doesn’t need to oversell. These songs are catchy, to a one, but they can also be deeply felt. That combination of pathos and power goes a long way towards making you forget about nine years without a full-length and just be ready to live with Lagwagon and its new album in the here and now.