Active Bird Community formed in the New York City suburbs when most of its members were in middle school. The original trio of guitarists Tom D’Agustino and Andrew Wolfson and bassist Zach Slater stuck together all through their formative years, eventually hooking up with drummer Quinn McGovern. Despite attending different colleges, the band stayed together and moved to Brooklyn. Since 2012 they’ve self-released three albums and a handful of EPs. Which brings us to Amends, the band’s first album for Barsuk, a record label that traffics in all things guitar-based and catchy.
Amends is both of those things. Active Bird Community sounds like the ’90s. Specifically, they sound like that brief period in the middle of the decade when the original wave of grunge groups gave way to a weirder assortment of alternative rock bands as major labels scrambled to sign and promote any rock act they could find in hopes of finding the next Nirvana or Pearl Jam.
That is immediately apparent as the album begins, opening the title track with muted electric guitar strumming and D’Agustino’s whiny but catchy singing with just a hint of feedback crackling in the background. This is the kind of song that feels like it’s going to explode into an all-out rocker. But Active Bird Community holds off. D’Agustino goes for a full minute before anyone else comes in, and even then Wolfson and McGovern add tension with repeated eighth notes and quiet snare drum 16th notes, respectively. For the second verse, the band pushes in fully to build the sound up, but it isn’t until the bridge, a full two minutes and seven seconds in, that the band finally releases the tension with a squalling guitar riff and D’Agustino’s voice just belting it out.
“Amends” gets a lot of mileage from its release of tension but by and large the album’s best moments come with this savvy mixture of full-on rockers and dynamic contrast. When they go for just quiet, they often lose some of the energy that makes them so much fun. The pop-punky “Sweaty Lake” is a great example of that energy. The song starts at full speed with a simple guitar riff, pounding drums, and D’Agustino at full howl, singing “And I won’t wait for life to start!!” The drums, bass, and rhythm guitar all gallop along together while the second guitar works through feedback-drenched high register notes. Even at full blast, though, the band still works dynamics into their songwriting, as there’s a verse that drops the second guitar and lets D’Agustino sing more calmly. There’s another bit where everything except for the vocals and a single guitar drops out before the full band bursts back in. And then after two minutes and 20 seconds at full bore Active Bird Community lets the song slow down and fade out gradually.
“Virginia” leans hard into D’Agustino’s vocal resemblance to Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis. He sings in his best laconic, nasally drawl while the guitars turn up the distortion even more than usual and the lead solos all over the place underneath the vocals. Intentional or not, it’s a great tribute that fits in perfectly with the band’s mid-’90s vibe. The mid-tempo “Baby It’s You” flirts with soul music by putting what would normally be the main melodic guitar riff on a trombone and adding some simple piano in the background. These two sonic touches give the track a whole different feel, which is readily apparent because whenever the trombone and piano aren’t playing “Baby It’s You”sounds like a typical Active Bird Community song.
“Blame” is the record’s slowest, quietest song, and it’s a full-on ballad. It even has a string section in the second half. But these things don’t make the song particularly interesting. Even Wolfson’s tender refrain, “I don’t know who to blame”, doesn’t move the needle. “Downstairs” also starts very restrained but gradually builds up in a way that closely resembles early Weezer. It’s another song that is fine but not all that memorable. Of the slower, quieter tracks on Amends, only “Unwind With Me” really works. It opens with light drums and a simple, slightly buzzing bassline. D’Agustino is back in J. Mascis vocal mode here and his delivery on lines like “I’m a thousand pounds of scared I’ll fuck this up,” and “I don’t need your advice / I’m unraveling everything” grabbed my attention. This is one of the few songs on the record that feature backing vocals and harmonies from Wolfson, and it makes a subtle but important difference in how the song builds up to its loud climax.
Amends closes out with a couple of great songs. “Metrics” has quick verses and a slower, louder chorus, and it’s a very effective contrast. It also has interesting, self-flagellating lyrics like, “Why can’t I sleep / Without a pill between my teeth” and in the next verse, “Why can’t I speak / Without a joke between my teeth,” delivered in a throaty rasp from D’Agustino. It even has some brief but welcome dual guitar harmonizing. “Lighthouse” takes a different tack, featuring D’Agustino treating an acoustic guitar like a fully distorted electric with fast, intense playing. The lyrics are personal reminiscences about his family, dredging up old teenage anxieties. Going all out like any of the rockers on the album but changing the arrangement just an acoustic guitar is a welcome change for the end of the album, giving the band just a touch of Dashboard Confessional. Which, for the record, is the perfect amount of Dashboard Confessional.
As a person who attended high school and college in the ’90s and formed the bulk of my musical taste at that time, I had no idea that a really good throwback would appeal so much to me. In retrospect, it seems obvious, but it’s not like there hasn’t been a bucketful of other ’90s-inspired guitar rock bands in the second decade of the 2000’s. But Amends hit me really precisely, to the point where I wanted the songs on this album that are only okay to be better so I could rave about the record even more. As much as I love their sound, though, this isn’t quite the home run I wanted it to be. So it ends up as a very good, very fun, very catchy album, which is enough to make me a fan of Active Bird Community and keep an eye on their career.