Let’s do a little bit of word association: “Long Island Sound.” What does that phrase mean to you? Is it a body of water? Or, does it encompass Taking Back Sunday, Straylight Run, Brand New and perhaps Glassjaw? After Bleed American broke emo onto alternative rock formats in the early 2000s, the aforementioned Islanders (and assorted New Jerseyans) took things to a colder, edgier place on the East Coast: more rooted in punk, but with slicker, sharper production, more verbose and venomous. And at least in their earliest incarnations, these acts had an discomforting tendency to invert the previously accepted gender dynamic, using their lyrics to make preemptive strikes rather than penning postmortems of heartbreak. So the above will probably do a lot to frame your opinion of Iron Chic, because the Huntington Station quintet aren’t hiding their lineage—they recently opened for Garden State spiritual brethren Saves the Day and their second LP (and first on punk stronghold Bridge Nine) The Constant One is filled with bracing, explosive hooks, unresolved sexual and spiritual tension and very meaningful “whoa”s. But it fortunately lacks any accusatory overtone, and welcomes far more people than it initially lets on: underneath the pop-punk veneer is one of the most flat-out fun indie rock guitar records of recent vintage.
This isn’t complicated stuff, burly, beery and well-meaning like Iron Chic themselves even when they’re worrying themselves into a state of hypnosis (“Wolf Dix Rd"). Their reference points are not esoteric: the dashboard-pounding opener is titled “Bogus Journey”, a Game Boy chiptune rendering of “Spooky Action at a Distance” serves as its own intro and the most meta moment involves “Hey Jealousy” karaoke. And though I’ve only heard things about what an Iron Chic show is like, I’ve still heard things: dudes in flannels not so much singing along with Iron Chic as singing back at them, with much gesticulating, finger-pointing, fist-pumping and so forth. These are the stories you hear a lot these days as community-galvanizing pop-punk and emo are getting more attention, and typically, you need a preface on the band’s roots and ideals to get the full picture of why kids lose their shit. The Constant One is a rare time where you can say “it leaves nothing to the imagination” as a compliment. Or, to frame it another way, Iron Chic are holding nothing back and do their damnedest to make you feel less alone if you happen to be in the parts of the country they haven’t reached yet.
The Constant One unwittingly serves as its own listening guide: Jason Lubrano‘s vocals are often doubled or tripled, if not group-hugged by the 15-deep “Iron Chic Solid Gold Singers.” Even solo, there’s a throat-straining grit and grain that still makes it sound like he’s ad-libbing over himself. Either way, you’ve learned how a group chant of Iron Chic lyrics sounds like, so go ahead and shout along in your car or your cubicle. Because they’re fun as hell anyway—“I don’t...I don’t fucking know!” “You had a heart of gold/ I know because I fucking sold it!” “get high/ say ‘fuck the world’ when we’re done with that!” “I can’t feel a fucking thing!” The lack of a Parental Advisory sticker should be inexplicable, except for the fact that The Constant One spends 40 minutes recalling the exact opposite of parental advisory; I’m pretty sure the first time your folks let you fend for yourself over a weekend, you heard the pick slide on “Bogus Journey” the moment their car left the driveway.
Quite often, “pop-punk” gets used to describe something that’s actually indie rock (see: Swearin’, Japandroids), which can trigger a lot of negative biases amongst people who are fairly certain they’re not into the former. The difference lies in tone: pop-punk evokes palm-muted power chords with clean distortion and nasal vocals, whereas indie rock is most associated with shambling, jangly and fuzzy guitars with drawling vocals. Iron Chic gives you both. At their core, each of The Constant One’s ten proper tracks builds on revved-up progressions of three or four chords, spaced out for broad melodies and strummed almost exclusively in air-guitar accommodating 16th notes. During the relative jams of “Spooky Action at a Distance”, “Bogus Journey” and “Wolf Dix Rd.”, you get J. Mascis and Doug Martsch leads shaved and bathed—they’re not quite riffs, not quite solos and they can melodically support the song for minutes at a time. Though it’s sonically aligned with the likes of axe-wielding party/shit-starters Diarrhea Planet or So So Glos, Iron Chic are more sincere than snotty, thus their closest analogue is probably Japandroids—while I sorta hope they tour together at some point, I also worry about some sort of class action suit from ticketbuyers who whoa’d themselves into weeklong hangovers.
Because while The Constant One is metric tons of fun, it’s kinda the same variety of fun throughout. Even on the most puritanical melodic pop-punk/emo records of this sort, you’ll get a token ballad, your “Freakish”, your “New American Classic", your “Hear You Me”, your “The Devil In My Bloodstream” and it’ll probably be the sixth song. Perhaps the first minute of “A Serious House on Serious Earth” counts, but the outliers on The Constant One are actually faster than what surrounds them. The constancy can make things a little blurry towards the end, and without the spoken word samples and goofy titles, it’d be tough to remember which song went was about the end of the world and which one was about the Gin Blossoms (that would be “True Miserable Experience”). Which makes a lot of sense for a record that all but affixes a foam dome to your head, so it's a same quibble. Look, it ain’t gonna change your life. Not by itself. It just serves as a potential soundtrack for a night that you’ll remember for the rest of your life if you can remember it the next day.
