The Death of a Party, The Rise and Fall of Scarlet City

It’s amazing what a shift in the musical climate can do to your supposed musical singularity: e.g., fuck you over completely. Death of a Party could once have been as easily lauded as condemned for the very thing that now knees their necks to the ground, which is a remarkable similarity to their musical predecessors, all those frantic, frenetic, punk rock bands spiked with dance beats and dynamics. I’ve come down on both sides of the fence, so far as this predicament goes — make it new or make it up to me somehow, you sick fuck — and, as I feel more inclined to say today, just make it, well.

Do a good job, you. If you can’t do it, be more like someone who can. If we can’t be innovative, we can be excessive; and just possibly, we can exceed. That is, there’s something to be said for capable imitation, particularly as filtered through individual perception. Which is just a fancy way of saying that if Death of a Party can write Gang of Four songs as Death of a Party, then that’s actually a pretty neat trick (think Pierre Monard not translating but “recreating” Don Quixote). Immersion isn’t such a bad thing if you’re immersing yourself in the right stuff, right?

But then the quality of said immersion ends up being what we measure success of said band by. If we’re going to fuck with originality, then we need to privilege excess. So, does Death of a Party sounds like Gang of Four? Kind of. Could they sound more like them? Absolutely! Should they try to? You fucking know it, dude. See, the thing is, Death of a Party isn’t a bad band but they can’t possibly be a great band; perhaps they should, then, instead, merely behave like a great band (hello, hotel room!) and, along the way, do their best to sound like said pre-existing great band (or bands). We’re not talking brand confusion — this is more like musical non-progression as a sort of comfort food. It’s the same reason Bloc Party’s first record was so easy on the ears; this was rock ‘n roll that we knew was rock ‘n roll and that was more than enough. So why not tear a page from the same book?

Of course, you’re welcome to be indignant about this and anything else but the fact remains that Death of a Party’s best will be interesting, perhaps, but important? Never. They simply don’t have the talent. They barely have the sound and here, by the way, this reviewer if forced to seriously stretch to find words for “angular” and for “sharp” that have not been previously used (read: “exhausted”) by presumably similarly exhausted critics. Let’s see… Moderate rock that sounds like someone cutting off their fingertips in a dimly lit kitchen. Occasionally as piercing as a chopstick through the drum of an ear. But, I mean, with a beat you can shift your eyes to. There is the occasional, lambent lurch — like there’s a great party going on and you can hear it, too, but you’re in the next room drinking cough syrup. But this (as a whole) never gets particularly New Wave-y; it never gets sticky. It stays fast and loose, and if that’s enough for you, buy the damn thing. Just be warned that though the style is impeccable, there’s not much oomph behind it. The production’s more tinny — more tin-snip-y, even — than I’d like. Too much damn treble. Not near enough oceanic fullness to back it up.

When you’re this hard on a band (and again, not a bad band! a fun band! probably great in basements, great with girls), it does seem like one should let the band speak for itself, at least for a bit. And so, buried beneath the disco-from-hell racket are actual lyrics. Actual content! Which you may want to avoid. Or to touch with gloved hands, at the very least. Before rubbing your eyes, etc. “With great regret I did entrust / this song to you / of drowning in your arms / into the deepest blue” isn’t bad so much as it is lugubrious. There’s got to be a less wordy and less adolescent way to say this. There’s something about the super-verboseness that’s been dripping into radio these days like poison from a fucking funnel.

And you can blame Panic! At the Disco and you can blame The Academy Is…, et al, but spare a little blame, too, for whoever isn’t stopping this influx, for the non-succinct, the casual, and the only apparently clever. As the late Vonnegut pointed out, one has to be careful who one pretends to be. Or as Frank Herbert said, “long pretense creates reality.” You can’t act average. I mean, look: you can’t imitate the incompetent (e.g., The Blood Brothers). You can only repeat the same mistakes. Lyrics like “In exhibit a, she states; ‘you’ll be the fox.’ / in exhibit b, she says; she says, ‘I’ll be the hound and I’ll find you in a faceless crowd / Yeah, you know I’ll hunt you down'” seem familiar but sour, with that feeling like, “not this, not again.”

Sound like whoever you want, but say something, man, anything. More of the same makes me want to die. The imitation of a style is the nascent version of the same; it doesn’t take much to be nothing much. Here’s to hoping Death of a Party try to be a little more ambitious in their future fawnery. As is, it’s all a little of this, a little of that, and lined with razors. There are some sequins in there, too, and probably some shit-kicker shoes. Das ist weichgespült, as they say, close, I imagine, to what I’m saying (as a whole) but translated literally as: “treated with softening agents.”