The album is dead as an art form. We're all to blame for its demise, with our iPods and our satellite radios and whatnot. The CD is an empty plastic vessel, sailing the ultimate form of pop music expression down the river Styx— which I believe was named after the band responsible for the bloated dystopian epic "Kilroy Was Here."
Sorry, I'm being overly pessimistic. It's just that I'm still reeling from the second side of 1986's "Nihilism Is Nothing To Worry About," perhaps the most transparently titled album since Talking Heads' "More Songs About Buildings and Food."
You can count 1986 among the endangered species still interested in making some sort of cohesive full-length statement. But, as you can tell by the album's Nietzsche-informed title, a good amount of the album asserts that absolutely … nothing … matters. And for some reason, we should be OK with that.
And that's odd, because the album's first act sounds so bright. However, chipping away at elements, the chipper chorus of "Better When You're Stoned" reveals the harsh criticism of the song's subject.
The songs at the front end of "Nihilism Is Nothing To Worry About" make you wonder if 1986 took its name from the wrong year. If anything, the sound of these tracks is grounded in events that took place a decade later, when Weezer's Rivers Cuomo was pining for pretty undergrads at Harvard and Dave Grohl decided Foo Fighters would make a good post-Nirvana project. Cuomo's "Pinkerton" pain reverberates in ghostly background vocals set against the murky-yet-hokey feel of the Foo's debut disc.
As much as I hate to pick on a band for sticking with a proven-safe musical formula, these are frustrating songs. Angelini's everyman vocals and the contrast between subject matter and sound made me spend the first six songs wishing 1986 would step outside its comfort zone, tear apart its alternative rock forefathers and reassemble them into some kind of new monster.
My wish was fulfilled, but in the grand tradition of wishes, I got more than I bargained for. The second side is another creature, but it manages to escape its creator's control, a menacing Mr. Hyde to the first half's Dr. Jekyll.
Like Hyde, the second half starts out charming, with the acoustic-driven "Holiday" and "Comatose", the latter a spacey kiss-off between boozy ex-lovers.
"The nights we had were all black to you/I should have seen the signs that you've had a few," Angelini sings. "Memory is something that you don't do/And me too."
But the really ugly and violent side shows through on the frankly suicidal ".22 Caliber" and the unapologetic peeping Tom's ode, "Creep Like Me." There's no humor or criticism in these songs; they're just straight up examinations of dark humanity. It's incredibly depressing, and not the kind of depressing that will make you want to revisit "Nihilism Is Nothing To Worry About" on a regular basis.
Yet, there is something to be said for an album that can have that kind of effect on a listener. If 1986 can inspire those kinds of feelings, the band must be doing something right. And it's all the better that 1986 does it through the medium of the album.
Maybe the album isn't as dead as previously stated. Maybe it's just that the outlook of 1986 is commanding too much of my attention.
