The So So Glos have always tied their identity to their native Brooklyn in a way few of their neighbors have. The band filled their 2013 breakout album Blowout with sketches of their borough’s streets, subways, skylines, and bodegas, guarding each reference with an insistence that in order to truly appreciate these things you had to have grown up there (as singer Alex Levine sees it, the city’s way of life is under constant threat from outsiders). More tangibly, the group’s members also co-founded two of Brooklyn’s big all-ages venues, Market Hotel and Shea Stadium. That’s the kind of legacy contribution to their music scene than few acts can claim.
Yet in the scheme of the city as a whole, the So So Glos are just a tiny blip. It’s one thing to nurture a music scene, but when condos and dog bakeries are pricing the people you grew up with out of your neighborhood, there’s not much you can do—one punk band alone can’t turn the tide of gentrification. On the group’s latest album, Kamikaze, they’re feeling the weight of that reality.
“The new New York that we’re living in now is almost unrecognizable to the gritty grime and crime-ridden streets that we grew up on as kids,” Levine lamented to Billboard. “It seems like we’re moving in a direction where the movements and art which sprung out of 1960s through 1990s NYC are being celebrated, but there’s very little respect for the environment that harbored the culture. It’s harder than ever to be a working artist in the city and the disparity between rich and poor is becoming greater and greater. People want to see graffiti in an art gallery but not in the streets; they want to see the CBGB toilet behind glass at the Met, rather than sit on it at an actual dive.”
On Kamikaze, Levine often comes across like The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Lillian Kaushtupper, a protector of the neighborhood’s endangered Biggie murals and policer of newcomers who look like potential Arcade Fire members. It’s a horrible thing, feeling like a member of a dying breed while you’re still in your 20s, and these songs convey a creeping sense that the band is waging a losing battle—not only against gentrification, but also against technology, the passage of time, and possibly even the shelf life on their own ideals.
Recorded with Rocket From the Crypt’s John Reis and mixed by Saddle Creek mainstay Mike Mogis, Kamikaze has a slightly slicker, glammier edge than its predecessors, as well as some unobtrusive strings on a couple of tracks, but the peppy backbeats, gang-shouted choruses, and fist-pumping enthusiasm remain. The tension between the band’s perennially youthful sound and their ever-more-jaded worldview that drives the record. Even when Levine rails against technology on “A.D.D. Life,” the sort of meat-and-potatoes, Undertones-styled anthem that John Peel would have loved, he does so with the keen awareness that he’s far from the first punk singer to touch on this stuff. “I’m a too-much-information-generation cliché,” he sneers.
That’s not the only time he makes himself a target. A Titus Andronicus-styled mini-epic set to an elbow-jabbing Op Ivy tempo, “Kings Country II: Ballad of a So So Glo” tells of the downfall of two selfie-snapping, phone-addled narcissists. In a final twist, though, Levine stops admonishing the strawmen he’s created and fesses up to his own hypocrisy. “I’m standing in some parking lot staring into my phone,” he huffs. “I guess I am a lot more like those two than I’d like to admit.” It’s easy to write a song condemning technology; it’s a lot harder to lead by example.
Kamikaze is filled with moments like these, tiny cracks in the seams of the band’s value system. The album’s title conveys not only a willingness to die for the cause, yet also a sense of predetermined defeat. So is it worth falling on the sword for something that no longer exists? And aren’t some changes for the better? Blowout opened with memories of rooting for the truly terrible New York Mets of Levine’s youth. The team has since rebounded—they’re defending National League champions now—yet to hear Levine tell it, he preferred them as underdogs. “I never cared too much for winning, so kiss my ass goodbye,” Levine sings defiantly on “Going Out Swingin’.” If he’s wrong, so be it. He’s chosen his hill.
