Trash Boy's Top 5 Albums of the Decade
Trash Boy is actually four people (not one boy alone) who love Philly and its DIY world and hate rules that oppress the marginalized and uphold bogus meritocracy.
Weatherbox - Flies in All Directions (2014)
Davey Jones
This was an easy choice for me. Weatherbox has been my top band for the past decade and then some. I’ve always struggled with depression and anxiety, and for years they have reached me on a spiritual level. Their heavy-hitting lyrics and powerful compositions have gotten me through some really hard times. The release of Flies in All Directions did not disappoint. This album contains such strong lyrical content that really paints a visual picture and tells stories of heartfelt emotions without relying on cliche topics like relationships and angst. His words, while seemingly ambiguous and vague, lend to feelings of the human experience as a whole, a connection and disconnection we all can feel at times. This album in particular is much more positive compared to his previous albums. The song “Bring Us The Head Of Weatherbox” speaks about the philosophy of Albert Camus and his ideals of Absurdism and the cosmic indifference, which really resonates with me. “Dark All Night For Us” lends to feelings of being alone but then finally finding like-minded people who you can walk through the darkness together with. This lighter tone lyrically also creates a poppier sound musically. Singer/songwriter Brian Warren has a very percussive style of songwriting which lends to the strong, hard-hitting rhythms he uses and the music compliments his story-telling lyrical style. His melodies, vocally and instrumentally, are so unlike anything I’ve heard before or since. His compositions have zero fat. No note or beat is unnecessary or extra; parts do not repeat if they do not have to. Songs like “The Fresh Prints of Bill Ayers,” “The Last White Lighter,” and “Drag Out” showcase these unique qualities, and are just a level of songwriting I hope to achieve in my own writing. To quote him from his song “Drag Out,” “You won’t find a band like mine.”
IDLES - Brutalism (2017)
Dan Baggarly
No punk album captured the urgency, anger, and dread of the last half of this decade as effectively as Brutalism. In 2017 I was a social worker driving through Philadelphia’s most neglected neighborhoods - places most of the city’s growing gentrifying class has never seen and has no idea exists - assisting people navigate the impossible and outrageously unfair structural obstacles that are inherent to poverty. I was angry every day, constantly feeling insulted and impotent trying to help people survive in an indifferent society that had just elected a president that has nothing but contempt for them. Discovering IDLES helped me feel more sane and less isolated, and lodged perfectly into my brain at this time in my life. I couldn’t listen to anything besides their debut album Brutalism for at least a month after I first heard it. The stakes of rising fascism are laid bare with lyrics and music that are both intentionally simple to the point that they deliver the most direct punch to the gut the band can muster. It is a concise portrayal of the bleak, fucked up world we live in as it is - both a salute of affirmation to those who recognize this reality and a sneer at those that are too callous or oblivious to notice. No other band was sufficiently addressing the increasingly obvious rot at the heart of western capitalism at the time, but IDLES managed to build a real and loving community of people people who feel angry, disenfranchised, and frustrated with the distribution of power. I will forever appreciate that. They are the type of band that reminds me why I love music in the first place. See them live if you get the chance.
Grace Vonderkuhn - Reveries (2018)
Dan Baggarly
Doubt is an extremely familiar feeling to any self aware DIY musician. It’s easy for even the most optimistic artist to feel a twinge of discouragement when grappling with the arbitrariness of the profit-based music industry, the enormous advantage afforded to those with easy access to finance, and wondering exactly how far the adage that limitation breeds creativity can be pushed. Grace Vonderkuhn and her band lay all these fears to rest with this kickass album. It’s somewhat astonishing to note that they recorded this album on tape, DIY, doing every track in single, unedited takes. Chris and I didn’t even know the backstory when we first heard the record at an antique shop that moonlights as a DIY venue (War3house 3) between bands at a show, but we were instantly hooked. To me it was the effectively lo-fi swaggerful psyched out baby of T. Rex and Guided By Voices that made me feel like I could take on the world and like all of my favorite albums, I listened to it every day until I was familiar with every sonic nook and cranny. Through the beautiful simplicity of an active DIY scene, we were soon able to meet the band at a show they played at the Barbary, set up a house show with them a couple months later, and have been fast friends ever since. We love them and we love this record. It’s fucking inspirational. Listen to it now.
PUP - The Dream Is Over (2016)
Chris Fortunato
Holy balls this band rips. You move through this album like a sojourner headed north on the Don Valley Parkway (“DVP”), guided by Stefan Babcock’s yelps calling out to you like a sherpa in a blizzard, wading past the painful memories of dead pets and dead relationships (“Sleep In The Heat,” “Old Wounds”), while spastic little guitar hooks whiz like shrapnel past your ears, stitched between gang-vocal choruses and constant kinetic shifts in the drums and bass. You pay your penance, sleeping on dirty floors (“Doubts”) and reckoning with your carelessness (“Familiar Patterns”) till you finally arrive at “Pine Point”, where you learn that it’s the ghost of Babcock’s brother that’s been beckoning at you from the tundra, and you understand that you came here not because you wanted to, but because the cold is where you belong. This album significantly changed our band’s direction. We were originally trying to make something we called “soul punk” (and you can hear hints of that in our first album) but PUP showed us that there’s a new soul in punk, and it’s wistful and angsty and raw. The first PUP song I ever heard was “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You I Will,” and as soon as that tempo change hit halfway through the song, that was it. I was like, these guy fuckin have it. We’ve seen them play a bunch of times, and they put on that rare show where you never want it to end. They’ll play for an hour and a half and there will still be tracks you’ll wish they played.
Mitski - Bury Me At Makeout Creek (2014)
Chris Fortunato
Mitski is one of my favorite artists to emerge in the 2010’s. While her newer albums are both excellent and have more interesting production, this album feels closer to the emotional core of her sound. It feels like a Richard Linklater movie at some points. Maybe it’s the “breeze in my Austin nights” (“Texas Reznikoff”) or the fact that the song “Townie” perfectly describes and fits the mood of the final party scene in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused.
I try not to let an artist’s biography determine my perception of them, but as someone with an immigrant parent, something about knowing that Mitski grew up as a third-culture kid, bouncing between the US and Japan, puts a frame in my mind around this album. You can feel Mitski on the outside looking in, watching her world & her own relationships from afar. This album makes me feel like there’s a viewpoint on American kitsch within me that I never fully realized. (And that’s what good art does! Wakes up what you’ve always felt but never could pin down!)
The instrumentals are so bare at times, leaving Mitski’s voice exposed like a solo singer, alone on a huge stage in a glimmering spotlight, eerily comfortable with all of the eyes on her. Bury Me At Makeout Creek feels like a slice of retro-Americana that we millenials never got to fully experience, but still feel projections of in our memories. “Drunk Walk Home” feels so real - “you know I wore this dress for you.” Ugh. That just cuts. “Jobless Monday” could be any basement DIY band’s breakout hit, and it feels right at home on this album. Not to mention this album is packed with unexpected chord changes, and twists and turns to every other vocal line. Just excellently written and highly compelling indie pop.
Honorable Mentions:
Hop Along - Bark Your Head Off, Dog
Flying Lotus - You’re Dead!
Pat the Bunny - Probably Nothing, Possibly Everything
Paramore - After Laughter
Great Grandpa - Plastic Cough
Daughters - You Won’t Get What You Want