I've never seen Hint Hint live-- the buzz in their hometown Seattle is that the shows are "intense" and "awesome" and "fucking life-changing, man"-- but from their "dark" and "atmospheric" debut, Young Days, I imagine it's something like this: The house cuts the music and four members of Hint Hint come out with their heads down, all crying softly, probably about existentialism. They pick up their instruments, cry again, maybe one of them prays, and then they stoically lower their heads again. Then frontman Peter Quirk comes out, limping for no obvious reason, also crying. He is wearing running mascara that initially looks like a pregnant bird has shit all over his face. He tells the crowd he doesn't care, though, because the world is going to end, and there's nothing he can do about it, except whisper about philosophy, which he then does.
Then, Hint Hint play a self-involved, 50-minute set of the most vapid rock 'n' roll of the year. I don't think there's even a word for this. Call it what you want, but with each passing minute, Young Days further proves that it has no substantial musical core to justify its rotten gild of overwrought angst. Hint Hint are so short on ideas, in fact, that they can barely afford more than one chord progression and guitar line per song, and must instead rely on star drummer Jason Lajeunesse to change up his beat enough to differentiate the verses from the choruses.
On opener "Natural Collegiate", for which Quirk does a terrible (but presumably his best) John Lydon impression, it quickly becomes clear that guitarist Dean Hudson and keyboardist Leona Marrs don't plan on moving past their respective Les Savy Fav and Pretty Girls Make Graves mocking. After some token breathing time for this suffocatingly dark song, Lajeunesse overplays his toms in the closing minutes, as if to compensate for the song's flatness. "Senator Blues" sheds light on Hint Hint's main compositional glitch: on Young Days, guitar and keyboard melodies never reach outside the basic notes of the chord, and for however much energy is pumped into them, the melodies always feel stagnant.
Musically, Young Days is a serious bore, but what sends the record across that thin line to "painful" territory is the conviction with which Hint Hint approaches such terribly uninteresting songs. Quirk is mostly to blame for this-- he just doesn't know when to shut the fuck up. On "Same Skies", he crummily evokes Jeremy Enigk, ruining the song's slick sub-bass synth grinds with shameful turns like, "I'm gonna burn your letters when I'm all burnt out," and, "This non-stop feeling, oh, when will it end?!/ It never ends." On "A Curse on You, Dear", Hint Hint rush headlong into Quirk's most laughable line: "This is a relationship I can't deny/ This is a relationship I can't comprise/ With my relationship I won't comply/ So let it die," which is driven home by a tense buildup to the dramatic utterance: "I'm not afraid to die."
With "Leviathan", Hint Hint throw what they must think is the greatest curveball in rock history. In contrast to the surrounding infinite sadness, here, a blistery piano bounce opens what will be Hint Hint's best approximation of Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al". The song almost works as the breath of fresh air Hint Hint seem to have intended it to be, but again, Quirk destroys it, ending the song with all of Kurt Cobain's vocal affectations and none of his heart: "You awaken slowly, my little baby/ And all of us fall dead, we can solve that." Hint Hint's gesture to "fun" is appreciated, especially given Young Days' propensity toward heartless melodrama and such half-assed "serious" melodies. Needless to say, "Leviathan" simply can't outweigh Young Days' guffaws-- and where the song's sad-goes-happy schtick is concerned, even Jimmy Eat World rock it better.
