You Blew It! frontman Tanner Jones once sang, “I’m tired of all these toss ups and all this feigned motivation/But I’ve always felt fine singing in your basement,” but that was two years ago—before they played much bigger rooms opening for pop-punk institutions Taking Back Sunday, Motion City Soundtrack, and the Wonder Years. In interviews for their third LP Abendrot, Jones commented that “at some point you start to become less pleased with songs you wrote for basements and living rooms.” For a young band on an upward career arc, this might indicate an embrace of the loud, obvious gestures necessary to level up: a preemptive non-apology to the hardcore, protective fanbase as a much larger one awaits. But as with the most recent work of Modern Baseball, Sorority Noise, and Turnover, you get the sense from the inquisitive and insular Abendrot that You Blew It! simply saw a bigger version of “the basement” on those tours, a mental and spiritual holding cell where bands always have to be pop-punk, both sonically and lyrically.
And so Abendrot is borne of You Blew It!’s desire to engage with the outside world, not to dominate it. As some of modern emo’s proudest traditionalists, You Blew It! know how to signify “mature third LP”: beginning with a solo, homesick introduction is a good start, as is calling it “Epaulette.” In fact, most of the song titles likewise abide by the time-honored emo-band practice of exchanging quirk and in-jokes for thesaurus-thumbing (“Autotheology,” “Kerning”), geographical signifiers (“Greenwood,” “Arrowhead”) and neologism (“Minorwye”).
This continues the trajectory of their 2015 EP Pioneer of Nothing, which did away with the spittle-flecked spite of their best-known songs, “Award of the Year Award” and “The Fifties.” But while Abendrot is a natural progression, it’s rarely effortless: particularly during its first half, You Blew It! audibly have to restrain themselves from their old habits. “Like Myself” and “Sundial Song” are littered with lyrics that wouldn’t be out of place on Grow Up, Dude (“I don’t feel like myself or anyone else,” “I can’t control my insides!”), but rather than careening into the choruses, the band pulls back on the distortion and shifts rhythms, doing whatever it takes to avoid the cutting one-liners and slashing power chords that Jones once felt were necessary.
Even at their most aggressive, the guitars on a You Blew It! song were unabashedly pretty, and while Into It. Over It.’s Evan Weiss returns to produce, Abendrot discards the lush, saturated sound of Keep Doing What You’re Doing for something more subdued. This isn’t slick by any means, but it reframes the leaves-bare placidity and exploratory interplay of Mineral’s EndSerenading, American Football, and Sunny Day Real Estate’s second LP into pop-punk song structure.
More notably, Jones’ lyrical concerns are no longer directed at you and the countless ways in which you’ve disappointed him. Jones is mostly confused about his own place in the world, of how to live in the moment with an overactive brain and how to move forward despite a crippling fear of failure. Though less vindictive and more reflective, the underlying emotions aren’t all that different than they were on previous You Blew It! records, and Jones can capture their essence on a memorably worded chorus without shouting it: “when God dies, I’ll skip the funeral,” he moans during the Manchester Orchestra-ted grunge lurch of “Autotheology.”
But when Jones seems compelled to transmogrify his thoughts into art, he ends up twisting himself into knots: “When the skin and vessels underneath/Choose this space for bruising/I’m somewhere in between/Clumsily pulling on the strings”; “If I could lay down, I’d let my cells accept the grounds.” It’s easy to figure out what Jones is trying to get at, but Abendrot’s lyrics often feel like writing for the sake of writing, labored rather than layered.
Like anyone else who recently graduated from college and is trying to create a clear boundary between their earlier life and adulthood, Jones recognizes his desire for growth but searches for something palpable to push for. It’s common and relatable stuff, and Abendrot never feels dishonest, just occasionally overwrought in its desire to achieve the stakes and transcendence of similarly inspired records like Holy Ghost or Goodness. Fortunately, You Blew It! just as often let their guitars speak for their behalf and Abendrot can be heard as the completion of a directive started by their last two albums: grow up, dude and keep doing what you’re doing.
