There are 19 songs on Quarterbacks’ proper debut and every single one of them is about a girl. More broadly, they’re about "girls"—specific ones that occupy young Dean Engle’s thoughts, couch and bedroom, but they're also present as a theoretical construct in his daydreams. "Knicks" and "Sportscenter"? They’re kinda about girls. "The Dogs" is 28 seconds long, Engle’s recollection of a guy with two puppies on his lap driving off a back road. It still manages to be about a girl, because he wishes the proverbial "you" were there to see it. Engle spends Quarterbacks in a heightened state of romantic curiosity, waking up with the express intent of either falling in love or falling out of love; a day without either is considered a miserable failure and staying in love is compared to being unconscious. To paraphrase a legendary overseer of quarterbacks, love isn’t everything to Engle. It’s the only thing.
Engle has found the perfect vehicle for this kind of subject matter, which is twee-punk in its purest form. Based on some of their songwriting values, Quarterbacks could be a hardcore band—they have the requisite velocity, the brevity, the structural minimalism. His most complicated songwriting tricks are doubling a guitar riff with his vocals and bringing a song to a dead halt midway through just to catch his breath. There isn’t enough time for a verse and a chorus, so Engle just stuffs as many words into a melody as it can hold, zips it backwards and lets it fly.
But as with nearly all bands in the indie world using a sports reference in their name, Quarterbacks call attention to their music’s total lack of aggro masculinity therein. The guitars are played without distortion, which is necessary for Engle’s classic, nasal lilt to be heard. The entirety of Quarterbacks is slightly less than 22 minutes, meaning the average song lasts about 69 seconds. Even in the context of twee defined by their K Records forebearers, Engle’s couplings are adolescent, relationships entirely based on watching TV, holding hands and kissing. Engel begs, "I wanna be the last boy to love you," the choice of the word "boy" being very important, as the settings of swimming pools, awkward dances and car rides liken college as more or less an adult summer camp.
Fortunately, there’s a cynical streak that prevents Quarterbacks from being a literal charm offensive. Engle acknowledges his own social failings without dwelling on them, but Quarterbacks also grapples with its right to even exist. "Simple Songs" is the most obvious meta moment, as Engle sings, "I believe in pop music the way I wish I believe in God/ Completely, without question," his preferred E minor-C-G chord progression serving as a surrogate Hail Mary. Except he doesn’t really believe they’re a proper substitute, implicating that choosing pop over God isn’t just a poor choice for one’s spiritual health, but a terrible cliché.
And so then, love. On "Center", Engle muses, "As I get older/ I recognize that love is mostly situational." True, and Engle seems to find it in every situation. Some form of "love" is mentioned in nearly half of Quarterbacks’ songs; within the first minute, Engle shrugs, "I’m in love as usual" and seconds later, "I’m not in luv with anyone/ What’s wrong with me?" He seems to realize he’s talking about some pop version of love, one that either belongs in scare quotes or misspelled as "luv" to drive home its falsehood.
In spite of the formalism, individual tracks on Quarterbacks are a sharp jolt. Together, they blur to make the album more of a mood piece; you can picture a house show where Engle starts to play the chords to "Usual" and the rhythm section thinks it’s "Stay in Luv" or vice versa. And while Engle ensures even the slightest song is a completed thought, compared to his more ambitious and extroverted peers, you wonder if the charm of the form exceeds that of the content—in similarly cramped spaces, Frankie Cosmos brings more clarity and whimsy, Modern Baseball more detail, Joyce Manor more intricate pop craftsmanship. Then again, Quarterbacks may just be the sound of modest ambition being met. In an interview with Fader, Engle admits, "20 years ago, this band would have released a 7-inch and then disappeared," his point being that he'd be perfectly fine if that was the ceiling. Which is to say that Quarterbacks truly is a labor of love.
