The anime series FLCL, like a lot of anime before it, depicts a young boy fighting robots. What distinguishes the series is that the robots emanate from an abyss in the boy’s brain. When they emerge, they resemble cubist knots of trash, mechanical blocks congealed into a kind of sinister animated matter.
When I listen to the music of British punk band Johnny Foreigner, I’m reminded of those robots, in both design and velocity. Johnny Foreigner songs often seem made up of components of older emo and pop-punk songs, but remembered wrong, reversed and compressed into anxious nodes. The opening seconds of their 2014 record You Can Do Better, in which snare rolls are processed and multiplied until they resemble explosions in a hollow cylinder, sound like distant cousins of Blink-182’s “Feeling This.” They’ve covered American Football’s “Never Meant,” but their version transfers the expansive atmosphere of the original into their own, narrower gravity, the distinct guitar phrases shivering in anxious proximity to each other.
Mono No Aware, their fifth album, which coincides with their ten-year anniversary as a band, is their most elastic and adventurous record since 2011’s Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything, in which unstable punk songs degenerated into piano ballads which then degenerated further into sound collages and spoken word. Mono No Aware isn’t as varied, but its structures have a tendency to digress, evaporate, and recombine, as if one is driving through a radically shrunken landscape. It radiates a feeling of seasickness, the guitars and drums lurching from extreme gravity into total freefall. These transitions aren’t completely seamless; you can hear the stitching. When “If You Can’t Be Honest, Be Awesome” lifts off into the remote and aerial region of an American Football song, you can feel the dissonance and tension of the transition.
Johnny Foreigner songs tend to be about geography, and how it combines with memory to produce something like three-dimensional feelings. Mono No Aware is specifically devoted to coastlines and to oceans. “I have walked into every ocean going,” guitarist Alexei Berrow sings in “Undevastator,” “holding hope out for future us/Hoping holding out was enough.” Later, on “The Worst of Us,” bassist Kelly Parker sings, “The streets shrink and the skyline blocks the sun/Whole weeks where I never see daylight/I’ve been dreaming of the ocean.” There’s a severe clarity to Johnny Foreigner lyrics, as if written under the sort of bitterness and honesty only accessed after approximately three drinks. “When your entourage froze/I’d never seen you so exposed/And I’ve seen you with no clothes,” Berrow sings in “The X and the O.” Even their meanest lyrics are haunted by ghosts, though, which often manifest in a form of delayed melancholy—a kind of hangover. A lyric in “Our Lifestyles Incandescent”—“We end up under the covers/but couldn’t be further from each other”—is capable of folding the entire Johnny Foreigner universe into itself.
Their songs also talk to each other—“Undevastator” is a sequel to You Can Do Better’s “Devastator,” and the lyric “I guess New Street couldn’t take it/But I can” in “Cliffjumper” ties back to a song on Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything, forming a series of arterial connections that resemble lines the way memories rhythmically link to each other in the brain. Memories are themselves temporal hangovers; as one accesses them, one also accesses what could’ve been, drawing reality through the distortions of regret and nostalgia. The best Johnny Foreigner songs, several of which are included on Mono No Aware, depict this process holistically; you hear someone sifting through their failures and their fantasies, their past and present mistakes swarming into each other.
