The Front Bottoms made their name singing anthems for ordinary people: songs for the suburbs, about drinking beer out of coffee mugs and hating your friends. Like much of the New Jersey duo’s fourth-wave emo, pop-punk ilk, their music works when it’s most immediate—a gut punch, not a slow burn. Brian Sella and Mat Uychich are at their best when they’re shouting about the minutiae that make your brain swell and fill your stomach with rocks, like the wine stain on your couch that’s been there since the night she left. Our current period of confinement calls for such intense accounts of mundanity. We’re trapped at home, some of us in our parents’ basements, lonely and out of work, awaiting the next spike in COVID cases. A new Front Bottoms album could’ve complemented our solitude. But In Sickness & In Flames doesn’t really seem fit for any moment.
An air of unfixed nostalgia blurs the past with an approximation of the present. Dusty acoustics and guttural full-band chants harken back to the duo’s early work that captivated college radio during the first half of the 2010s. But that influence is sandwiched between, and subdued by, modern indie-pop flourishes, synth breakdowns, and a chorus of “oohs.” Sella has mostly abandoned his signature Moleskine impressionism and hometown scene-setting. IS&IF deals largely in cliches, gesturing toward broad themes like love and growth without saying much of anything.
Lyrics are the album’s biggest downfall. Solid riffs are tainted by half-baked platitudes: “You are the truth I choose to bend myself around”; “We are all going the hard way”; “Everyone blooms in their own time.” The songs place a lot of weight on these phrases, repeating them until they almost sound profound. “Jerk” could have been a fun MySpace-era ditty, with its tinny Auto-Tuned intro, but it devolves into a refrain that sounds stale by its second round: “Like a jerk, yeah I know that I look like a jerk.” The Front Bottoms’ once charming, choked-up spoken-word interludes feel awkward and stilted.
As made evident by 2017’s ’80s pop-tinged Going Grey, Front Bottoms lose their magnetism when they focus on radio appeal. IS&IF’s hooks are catchy enough to make their way onto, say, the Sirius XM indie channel, but probably won’t inspire a new generation of Front Bottoms fans. A few songs embrace the band’s old style and intimacy, enough to attract day-one listeners, but not enough to make IS&IF an essential album.
After co-producing their last LP with Nicholas “RAS” Furlong, an Avicii collaborator who counts credits with Blink-182 and All Time Low, the Front Bottoms decided to co-produce their new album with Mike Sapone, whose roster includes acts like Sorority Noise, Oso Oso, Brand New, and Taking Back Sunday. On the album’s highlights, he brings the band back to their unpretentious, guitar-driven roots. “Montgomery Forever’’ is a buddy jam about mental illness and self-deprecation. If mosh pits can exist in a post-COVID world, this song will inspire some flailing bodies. “Leaf Pile” blazes forth with fiery guitars and echoed shouts (“I don’t wanna talk/I wanna look out the window”). The lyrics land when you can tell they were transferred directly from brain to paper: Lines like “You’ll always be my girlfriend even after we get married” and “Seemed like a good day to be barely alive” are unfussy and childish in a good way.
The Front Bottoms have consistently avoided labels, falling somewhere between folk-punk, pop-punk, and indie rock. That fluidity was a strength when their music was undergirded by a sense of urgency and earnest DIY sensibilities, when they built a community around angst. In Sickness & In Flames is just noncommittal. The album is twee and punk and neither of those things. It’s understandable that the Front Bottoms, a band whose legacy revolves around post-adolescent growing pains, have lost some of the spark that fueled their first six albums. They’re older now, no longer concerned with the girl that forgot about them during her semester abroad. Sella once stood out for a demeanor that was both wide-eyed and jaded, torn between a yelp and a sigh. In Sickness & In Flames tilts too far toward the former; the Front Bottoms have lost their bite.
Buy: Rough Trade
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