Mining the trauma of a breakup is nothing new in the rock lineage, and the case could be made such fodder is a brick in the genre’s foundation. Molding such an experience into a novel artistic form while avoiding mopey clichés, though, is another beast entirely. How does an artist exorcise his or her demons when said demons stem from an event that just about everyone has gone through, without seeming self-indulgent or prosaic? With their sophomore album
Weddings & Funerals, Chicago’s the Kickback deftly manage to inject some new vigor (and venom) into the breakup album paradigm, largely by not sounding like a breakup record. The source material’s ugliness may be its core, but its encased in layers of triumphant beauty and pop hooks.
The album bursts out of the gates with a frenetic urgency, as though it cannot be bridled. Clocking in at barely longer than a half-hour with only one song cracking the four-minute mark, it’s a lean record. Producer Dennis Herring (Elvis Costello, the Hives, Modest Mouse, Wavves) ensures all ten songs play to the band’s strengths and land with an immediacy that doesn’t waver or overstay its welcome.
With a few deviations, the music throughout is upbeat and joyous, sweeping you up in the melodies and lulling you into singing along. That serves to belie the lyrics’ dourness and often excoriating nature. Penned by frontman Billy Yost, they run the gamut of emotions trailing a divorce with an undercurrent of palpable anxiousness revealing itself and becoming more pronounced on repeated listens.
As the lyrics vacillate from introspective and self-lacerating to externally accusatory, they could seem unfocused, but this is a deliberate method of capturing the organic pendulum swing of post-separation fallout. The lyrics are personal but are written elliptically enough as to have a universality. It’s this dichotomy between exuberant music and lyrical weight — a juxtaposition not unlike the feelings meant to accompany the album’s titular milestones — that makes the album such a standout.
Lead single and opener “Will T” begins with manic laughter, conjuring an image of one overcome by hilarity, rocking himself in a straightjacket on the floor of a padded room. The cackling then briefly subsides as Yost’s raspy vocals rise to the fore above click-clacking percussion, rhythmic strumming, and a corona of synths. This back-and-forth continues throughout the song, only breaking in its bridge, which sounds like a façade crumbling as Yost cathartically belts, “Inside my head / We’re already dead.” It sets the parameter of the song cycle about to follow.
“I Taste My Own Blood” has a more expansive aura, the sinuous bassline and hard-hitting drums given more room to breathe. Again, synth elements are used just enough as an enhancement without dominating, a subtle device used across the record. After a blustering storm, the song tellingly fades out with a church-like organ hum backing Yost’s assurance that he guesses he’s doing OK, clearly something he’s trying to convince himself of while not buying it.
Third cut “Vision Board” is the record’s most aggressive, hammered out like an industrial punk mashup. Opening with its refrain, it charges at breakneck speed and only gives a respite in the brief verses, before ratcheting back up in the pre-chorus and taking off again. If you’re listening to this while driving, you’re all but guaranteed to let the anger in it lead you to accelerate to a reckless degree, especially when the incendiary guitar solo happens late in the game.
On its heels is “Rube”, perhaps the album’s most musically pretty number, in turn, followed by the delicate “Dating Around”. Functioning as something of an intermission, it forsakes much of the energy of the preceding four tracks and zeroes in for some stark intimacy. Supported by minimal key tones, Yost captures the self-destructive-but-can’t-help-it compulsion to speculate about your ex seeing someone else and getting on with their life before you’ve been able to heal. It suitably wraps the album’s first side and, rather than narratively signaling a degree of acceptance, it presages the narrator entering a more unhinged phase in its second half.
These last five songs compose one of the best and most consistent sides of 2017. Starting with “Pale King”, it begins with a simmer bound to erupt. It surges with an anthemic stride, Yost offering some of his most confessional lyrics. Built around an acoustic guitar and layers of post-punk synths, its momentum increases until it feels like a train is going faster than it should and is on the cusp of veering off its tracks. Instrumentation devolves into chaos as the vocals become more frayed, Yost snarling like a cornered animal: “Can’t stand anyone / But I can stand alone,” he sings near its midpoint. The song spirals out and collapses as Yost’s shredded vocal cords deliver the misanthropic couplet of “Learned how to love / But I think I’m born to hate.” “False Jeopardy” picks itself up from the rubble, playing with waves of flickering distortion amid another earworm chorus that seems oddly hopeful in its declaring that “it’s not the end”. That brief hope is lost on the rumbling “Hotel Chlorine”, which finds a whispering Yost begging for affection in the form of slavery.
The album’s strongest and most ambitious cut is the penultimate “Reptile Fund”. Jittery electronic blips bubble up before giving way to a cinematic sprawl (and a quirky yet infectious Auto-tuned harmonica solo), Yost seeming to profess he’s turning over a new leaf and approaching resolution. Across three disparate movements (verse, pre-chorus, chorus) led by an acoustic chug that detonates with the album’s catchiest refrain, it feels like the sun is finally cracking through clouds and the thunderheads are passing.
That prophesied closure or the closest one comes to it in a marriage’s wreckage, is attained in the finale, “Latest Obsession”. A clamor of percussion swirls about before coalescing into a basic beat, approximating a frenzied mind regaining its composure. Yost sings with a world-weary but resigned self-awareness. There’s a sense of temporal distance between the damaging incident and its sufferer, the scab nearly ready to be pulled off. A buzz writhes beneath the vocals before melodic guitar parts flash like distant beacons, signaling the shore is near. In the bridge, Yost declares his epiphany that resentment and punishing himself for his ex’s benefit is inherently pointless. It’s a helluva kiss-off song, and the bitter resignation has a stinging barb with such lines as “Every time you said it would be all right / Well, I should have realized you talk to yourself at night”. On the surface, the tune fits the bill of an emotional denouement, yet there is a kernel of unease implying the turmoil can, and likely will flare back at any moment and that idealized notions of “moving on” are naïve fallacies.
The great thing about the
Weddings & Funerals’ short runtime is it while it almost breezes past you, it leaves a lingering trace that compels you to revisit it multiple times. With each spin, you pick up something you overlooked before. Put simply, it hooks you and doesn’t let go. That such a bleak subject as a divorce can manifest with gravitas, insight, and indelible catchiness while avoiding being morose is quite a feat. It’s an album that deserves a spot alongside breakup classics Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, the Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen, Beck’s Sea Change, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ The Boatman’s Call.