Bracket
When All Else Fails (Fat Wreck Chords)
by Marc Hirsh
Bracket
When All Else Fails (Fat Wreck Chords)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002
Bracket sounds good. But no, they don't, not on the evidence of When All Else Fails. Or, hang on, maybe they do, but it's just that I've never been a fan of that ultra-melodic So-Cal pop hardcore sound, where the bass is ultra-trebly (isn't that a contradiction?) and the guitars buzz (like heavy metal) rather than ring out (like power pop). Plus the songs are no good, but... wait, then why am I bobbing my head to "Parade?" Damn.
Such are the backflips and somersaults to which my brain is subject in trying to reach some sort of unequivocal conclusion about When All Else Fails. The one hard-and-fast bit that I can grab onto is singer/guitarist Marty Gregori's voice, which finds that happy, heretofore unexplored medium between Greg Graffin and Fastball's Tony Scalzo. I can't really explain the latter (genetic happenstance?), but the former seems pretty clear-cut, since the album's crammed full of Bad Religion-type harmonies (not many Bad Religion-style melodies, however). That band's not the only touchstone here, just the most overt. "Me Vs. The World," for instance, sounds an awful lot like the Barenaked Ladies, just louder and a bit faster (but not much at all), while "You/Me" is "Where Is My Mind" had the Pixies decided to keep things fairly low-key and subject the listener to a distractingly splashy and trebly snare (which thankfully sits out the rest of the album).
Elsewhere, Bracket can't seem to decide what it wants to sound like. "Warren's Song Part 9" intriguingly uses, to the letter, the components of reggae (the verses) and doo-wop (the choruses) without actually becoming either of them (or successfully melding them into a seamless whole). "A Happy Song," meanwhile, is actually two songs (one mid-tempo fast, one slow, both of which hinge on the lyric "I'm everything without you") with a clear and definite break between them. Finally, the album doesn't end so much as stop as though the band ran out of songs, rather than being sequenced in any particular order.
That may not necessarily be true, as the first and second slots are prudently taken up by, oh, let's just call them the best songs on the album, the speedy and cheeky and wonderfully-titled (if unnecessarily commaed)"Everyone is Telling Me I'll Never Win, If I Fall In Love With A Girl From Marin" (although the line about "her shit-stained smile" worries me for perhaps obvious reasons) and the aforementioned head-bobber "Parade." After all that, When All Else Fails sounds fine, I guess, a real B/B+ record. I'm sure that if I ever decide to put it on again (at the appropriate point in my now-what-did-this-sound-like-again? cycle), I won't reach for the stop button. But when that might be, I couldn't possibly guess.