on [folk] punk's not dead

My favorite love songs are the ones that don't waste time: simple and unrefined, awkward and sincere. My favorite love songs are the ones that don't really sound like love songs. They're the ones that might make you cringe a little not because their quixotic sap will give you a toothache, but because their bumbling honesty will induce some parasympathetic sweaty palms. They're the ones that make you question whether you're falling in love with the song, the person behind it, or the feelings the person behind it is so bravely sharing.

Which brings me to the Front Bottoms’ “Peach,” off their 2013 album Talon of the Hawk, which I am currently listening to several times a day because I am both an obsessive and a creature of habit, but also because I can’t not listen to music that makes me feel like I am in love (with the world, through the eyes of a girl...)

I’m kind of late to the game on the Front Bottoms. I’m late to the game on a lot of great new music, usually because my loner punk pride gets in the way of trusting that music created after 1995 is worth my time. But now that I’ve gotten over that initial imaginary hurdle, I am completely, heartbrokenly obsessed with this band. I am completely and totally relieved that this band is in existence. The Jersey band feels, refreshingly, like a relic from pre-aughts age, from the golden DIY age when just an honest voice and some messy guitar could be left alone, in their purest forms, to convey exactly what they intend: the purest and messiest projections of our inner selves. Isn’t that the point of music: to make us feel something?

The Front Bottoms make me feel a lot. They make me feel a little unsettled, which is what the best folk punk should do. They make me feel like I’m not alone in my weirdness, which is also what the best punk rock should do.

The writer in me feels a kinship with Brian Sella’s lyrics. They are simple, they are candid, and they are brave. He says exactly what he means to say: I do things wrong / You thought I might. All of our awkward humanness, sorted into pure poetry.