Modern Baseball’s You’re Gonna Miss It All is a sophomoric album in multiple ways. It’s the Philadelphia band’s second full-length, for one thing. Beyond that, Brendan Lukens recently finished his second year at Drexel University, and he never lets you forget what 21-year-old college students are often like—culturally literate, if not necessarily “book smart,” blurring the line between introspective and self-obsessed, impressed by their capacity for clever wordplay and emotional awareness while knowing both of those qualities conspire to prevent people from saying what they actually feel. And due to the all of the aforementioned, Lukens is kinda full of it, too. He won’t exactly lie to you, but he’ll tell you what he aspires to be while doing the exact opposite. Observe this howler from “Fine, Great”: “I hate having to think about the future/ when all I want to do is worry about everyone but me.”
There’s a fine semantic misdirection here, and he knows it: it’s a song about how much of a pain in the ass it is to have people care about you, and all he really wants is for everyone to worry about someone other than Brendan Lukens. He can do that just fine, great? Along with fellow MB songwriter Jacob Ewald, Lukens frets over the past, future, and especially the present. He thinks about the next five minutes, the next morning, and whether his death will be cool enough to get a mention from Jim Gardner on Channel 6 Action News. And he worries a hell of a lot about himself, and how other people figure into that. It’s a lot to endure because people in Lukens’ situation get drunk most every night, stumble into relationships, and run from their problems. If you’re in this emotionally combustible state, you’ll relate to You’re Gonna Miss It All directly and deeply. If you at least recognize it in retrospect, you can just as easily appreciate its wealth of infectious songs that are both sharply observed and sharply written.
About that last descriptor, Lukens describes himself as “sharp as a tack/ but in the sense that I'm not smart just a prick.” These songs are often funny and can induce wincing recalls of your most embarrassing romantic fuck-ups, but Lukens doesn’t seem all that concerned about being liked or admirable. If he’s pissed at you, he’ll probably just say “fuck you.” If he’s excited about the fact that you sat next to him on the couch instead of ignoring him like the last time you hung out, he’ll add “niiiice” as an aside. He likes metaphor, but he's much better at literalism, so the aspirational poetics of “Notes” don’t hit as squarely as the times where he describes a lonely Friday night as “no better time for exercise wishing you were still my girlfriend.”
Which explains why Modern Baseball have namechecked Tokyo Police Club and Los Campesinos! as formative influences. That much is conveyed through similarly short and spiky songs that don’t quite fit as pop, punk, or pop-punk. You’re Gonna Miss It All mostly concerns itself with wasted time, but it doesn’t waste much itself, dense with both hooks and lyrical barbs. Likewise, Ewald’s nasal, nerdy, and needy vocals bring to mind not only David Monks and Gareth David, but elder prose-songwriting bards like Craig Finn and John Darnielle. To say they can be a dealbreaker is an understatement: upon hearing him pronounce “accoutrements,” “DIY ethics,” and “Mommy and Daddy’s data plan” in the same song or getting a little too Urkel-esque with the hook from “Broken Cash Machine” (“why did I do that?”) some people might flat-out refuse to even reach the bargaining table.
Like pretty much every guitar band these days that doesn’t immediately scan as “indie rock,” Modern Baseball have been lumped into “emo”—and yes, considering Modern Baseball are probably Weezer fans and are caught up in girl problems of their own making, that label sticks to an extent. Thing is, the actual music of You’re Gonna Miss It All is just about everything but emo, mostly some code-splitting of the pop-punk double helix. There’s shout-and-whoa power-pop (“Charlie Black”), prim twee (“Going to Bed Now”), folky punk (“Your Graduation”), all built around sturdy choruses. One thing Modern Baseball do have in common with their trendpiece peers is that they’re getting attention because they’re much, much better at making music than they were two years ago. This is evident in the songwriting, which is more confident and ambitious, but just as importantly, the production. You're Gonna Miss It All was mastered by Will Yip (basically the Steve Albini of this scene) and engineered by Jonathan Low, a guy who’s worked on the National’s records. So needless to say, it’s going to sound a lot more professional than Sports, a charmingly amateur affair that seemed content to be passed around amongst Modern Baseball’s Facebook friends.
And that’s crucial, since Modern Baseball are a band that deserves to engage a wider audience. Nonetheless, Lukens is still dealing in small stakes. He tries to think himself into a relationship he’s trying to talk and drink himself out of. When he does make a move, he worries about sticking around too long because her roommates might hear them. He goes to apartment parties, drinks because he drank the night before, can think of little besides the smell of garlic and coffee on his breath and goes from “living like a king without you” to “living like a piece of shit without you” in about a minute. Considering their common Philadelphia homebase, a fun exercise is to imagine You’re Gonna Miss It All as the other side of the stories told on Waxahatchee’s Cerulean Salt. Of course, the narrators are totally mismatched, but all of their songs are dysfunctional anyway. Kate Crutchfield may be singing about many of the same things, but she sounds wearier, wiser, someone you’d ensure with your secrets and seek out for advice. I don’t know if I’d trust Brendan Lukens to complete a beer run for a case of Keystone Lite, he’d probably come back with a six-pack and a funny story about the girl he met from his old high school along the way—these are the small, relatable pleasures of which a Modern Baseball song is made.
