Pop punk exists to voice a narrow set of emotions, and per the Descendents, it's never supposed to "grow up." Still, you can move the furniture around a little, make some tweaks here and there. Spraynard's third album Mable does away with the sophomoric song titles ("Internet May Mays", "Are You Ladies Familiar with the Work of Zach and Cody"), paper-thin mixing, and pitchy vocals of past releases for a buttoned-up (but nonetheless boisterous) sound. With Mike Bardzik —a musician/producer known for his work with the Casualties and Everyone Everywhere —manning the boards, Spraynard’s punkish project has graduated from bedrooms and basements to a bigger stage. Lead singer Pat Graham is much more confident in his ability to hold a tune this time around: His nasally tenor is more grounded and melodically consistent, even on shoutier tracks like "Bench". As with peers such as Modern Baseball and Algernon Cadwallader, Spraynard cater to the awkward ones, the losers; as the album’s opening line puts it, boldly and matter-of-factly: "I am every person that you’ve ever ignored/ I am the flaming bag of dog shit on your porch."
Embedded as nostalgic groupthink and suburban malaise may be within the modern pop-punk blueprint, Spraynard's sonic and lyrical concerns are less successful when they toe the tropes. "Lost Boys" is the perfunctory nihilistic ditty about "fuck[ing] up just for the hell of it," "Pond" the romanticized portrait of a hometown haunt. As with Modern Baseball’s You’re Gonna Miss It All and Man Overboard's Real Talk, (ostensibly) female subjects are recurrently portrayed as thorny, shallow subjects oblivious to the pain they inflict. "I asked you to hang/ You just looked away," Graham whines on "Out of Body", "I’ve got nothing to say/ I think I want to die." Heartbreak and social rejection are two of pop punk's lyrical cornerstones, sure, but lyrics like the aforementioned couplet—or "Medicine"'s awkward likening of a lover to sleeping pills—tread dangerously close to self-pitying excess.
Graham ultimately spends more time looking inward than outward on Mable*,* and it’s these reflections that constitute its crux, as well as its biggest source of interest. On cuts like "Buried", the warm guitars, "woah oh" choruses, and peppy rhythms obfuscate suffocating feelings of agoraphobia and anxiety. "Pond" takes a Sisyphean glance into the mirror—"I hate my own body, but I am fucking lazy/ I sit here wanting change but just keep doing the damn thing"—only to shrug it off with a silver-lined retort: "What’s the use in trying to survive if we don’t do what makes us feel alive?"
There are a few melodramatic stumbling blocks, and some painfully awkward moments, but melodrama and awkwardness sort of come with the anthemic-pop-punk territory. Spraynard serve up endearing honesty within the crucible of FM-friendly pop punk, and their music is better suited for long summer drives than late-night mope sessions; it’s introspective, but also accessible. Mable might not be a knock out of the park—"Bench" sounds like lukewarm Weezer, and the five-minute "Out of Body" seems out of place—but it might be one the catchiest sets of pessimist punk songs since Fireworks’ Oh, Common Life.
