A phoenix, Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza were just a few of the enemies the Plastic Constellations downed on 2006's Crusades. Halfway through the record, the stage becomes an outright battlefield, the kick drum transforms into an earthquake, the bass apes a typhoon, and all four Minnesotans eventually go down fighting, only to be reunited at the three-quarter mark. Back to work in 2008, the Constellations get topical--spurred by global warming, the quartet fight famine with fistfuls of flames, and that's not on the song called "Flames and Rain". So the Plastic Constellations are without a doubt the most disaster-archetype-fixated non-metal band of the past 10 years.
It was as wobbly 14-year-olds that this band started, and they've since been slowed by the hydra of four years of college-related sabbaticals and a recently declared "indefinite hiatus on the horizon." Their jagged turn through post-punk has now spanned more than a decade, and their Drive Like Jehu/Refused/Les Savy Fav/Fugazi shrapnel finally, in their relative maturity, sounds a lot like it did one album prior-- a first. The back of the Plastic Constellations baseball card will now forever read that the band gang tackles a "la la la" chorus better than a thousand Murder by Deaths, alliterates with the best of 'em, and channels cabaretish gothic horror with more conviction than either than Fall Out Boy or MCR.
The record starts with a drawn-out gang vocal and ends with a drawn-out gang vocal: first they escape from their boring lives ("Stay that Way"), then they make a bunch of friends and call it a day ("So Many Friends"), presumably a more or less career-arc summary that could apply to every band ever. Throughout We Appreciate You, the Constellations gather hopefully in the night, post up on rooftops and in fortresses, get nostalgic for the basements of their past, and fall in love with the very same flames they'd with whom they'd just been fighting. Then they realize they have only one life to live and so stop sleeping, find some answers and, in the finale, gather in the backyard for first day of the rest of their lives. (Coincidentally, this plot is identical to that of Be Your Own Pet's Get Awkward, romantic subplots and all.)
When Crusades came out in 2006, the Constellations got lumped in with the Pearls & Brass and Swords of the world, but you don't get the sense anybody in the Plastic Constellations ever listened to much metal. The sidewinding guitar at the beginning of "Disastrophe" is more Jehu than Jesu, and "Perched on a Porch" starts with a tangled drum creep that could've been cribbed right off a UOA record. The band's general dynamic tilt is a trebly scream-- they may even get a bit teary on the Native Nod-ish "Heat Knocker"-- and "Floated Down and Flew Around" has a ska-climatic horn outro, hardly tough guy stuff. "We are Genius Millionaires" is a bedroom-recorded piano interlude, a rueful joke I presume about the wisdom of a career in rock. This site once puffed the band's style as a "convincing facsimile of a high school punk show for the ages"; We Appreciate You is almost certainly an excellent version of a wave farewell, an End Hits in which the end actually hits. They do not sound afraid.
