Say Anything's 7th album, Oliver Appropriate, is out next week, 5 months after frontman Max Bemis published a 4,000-word letter to fans basically explaining that, among other things, this would be the band's final record for the time being, with no future tours planned. Bemis was one of the first rock songwriters who's younger than me that I found really impressive and inspiring, so it's strange to think about him possibly retiring from music at the age of 34. But he's been really prolific up to this point, all the while dealing with heavy personal stuff, and he's now writing comics for Marvel, so if he wants to step away from music for his own well being, I'm pretty satisfied with what he's already made.

Say Anything deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. The Futile
2. People Like You Are Why People Like Me Exist
3. Yellow Cat (Slash) Red Cat
4. Death For My Birthday
5. About Falling
6. Metal Now
7. Overbiter
8. Less Cute
9. No Soul
10. Woe
11. All My Friends
12. Sheep
13. The Church Channel
14. Spidersong
15. Crush'd
16. Died A Jew
17. 17 Coked Up And Speeding
18. Every Man Has A Molly
19. Cemetery
20. Lost My Touch
21. Sorry, Dudes. My Bad
22. Chia-Like, I Shall Grow

Track 11 from Baseball (2001)
Track 1, 3, 10, 14, 18 and 22 from ...Is A Real Boy (2004)
Track 6 from ...Was A Real Boy (2006)
Tracks 2, 5, 9, 13, 16 and 21 from In Defense Of The Genre (2007)
Tracks 4, 8, 15 and 19 from Say Anything (2009)
Track 7 and 12 from Anarchy, My Dear (2012)
Track 20 from Hebrews (2014)
Track 17 from I Don't Think It Is (2016)

I've always held emo kind of at arm's length, but in the mid-'00s, I fell in love with some of the bands were becoming platinum stars, and I really rooted for Say Anything to follow in the footsteps of My Chemical Romance and Paramore, whose singers guested on In Defense Of The Genre. Ultimately, the handful of minor alt-rock radio hits from Say Anything's 3 major label albums never led to anything bigger than a sizable cult following, and I still kind of blame the single choices -- I hear so many would-be hits on In Defense, and yet they went with "Baby Girl, I'm A Blur"? But the band's appeal was always a little niche compared to some of their Warped Tour contemporaries, all the unpredictable twists and turns and tempo changes of their arrangements, Bemis's neurotic sense of humor and verbose verses, and big ambitious albums.

Falling for "Alive With The Glory Of Love" and then picking up ...Is A Real Boy (with the bonus disc with several additional songs, ...Was A Real Boy) and the double album In Defense in the space of a few months in 2007 hit me hard, hearing almost 50 songs by a newish band and being bowled over by so many of them. It's probably the biggest moment of infatuation I've had with a band since I was a teenager.

And like a lot of Say Anything's teen fanbase, my love for the band has been tested by later albums. The self-titled album swings for the fences with big pop hooks and I've really grown to love it a lot, but Anarchy, My Dear moved toward acoustic and undistorted electric guitars and Hebrews replaced all the guitars entirely with big schmaltzy synth strings, taking a lot of the teeth away from the band's sound. I Don't Think It Is felt like an overcorrection in the other direction, loud and lo-fi and light on hooks. Revisiting those albums for this playlist, however, I feel a little more affection towards them than I expected to. Bemis's wife, Eisley frontwoman Sherri DuPree-Bemis, is a welcome vocal presence on the later albums, particularly "Overbiter," one of the band's catchiest songs ever. And "Lost My Touch," which felt at the time like Bemis overreaching with the meta eulogy for his own alleged creative decline, feels a little more poignant in light of him deciding to actually hang it up.

The tracks released from Oliver Appropriate so far are promising -- they don't swing too far in one direction or the other like the recent records, but it also doesn't sound too painstakingly like the sequel to ...Is A Real Boy that Bemis conceptualized it to be. Real Boy is a special record, probably one of my favorite rock albums of the last 20 years. Say Anything's self-released first album Baseball wasn't commercially available for a long time, and though it was finally released as part of 2013's rarities compilation All My Friends Are Enemies, I didn't listen to it until, like, last week. The song that gave the comp its title, "All My Friends," is good, but in general I feel like I don't need too much of the pre-Real Boy era.

While I try to present an artist's most popular album cuts in these playlists, sometimes I gotta go more with my personal favorites. That means I veered away from fan favorites like the album's most sentimental acoustic track, "I Want To Know Your Plans," and the album's most snarky punk anthem "Admit It!!!!" in favor of the more interesting and textural tracks that keep me coming back to the album like "Chia-Like, I Shall Grow" and "Yellow Cat (Slash) Red Cat."

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14, 2019 at 8:53 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.