Featured Album Review by FM, The Digital Boy
The truth behind Bayside’s fourth full record, Shudder, is that it is all it was hoped to have retained: incredible wit, foot-stomping beats and haunting melodies, accompanied with a sense of aggression, hope, hopelessness, disdain, love and loss. The songs on Shudder are melancholy, but the band tries to tell us that, regardless of the facts at hand, things will be OK in the end.
The album is a bit more optimistic than their previous releases, but captures the dark emotional side of the band, as their other albums have. Shudder takes us back to its punk roots, with songs “Rochambo (Rock, Paper, Scissors)” and Bayside spells out their apathy and misery with its acoustic “Moceanu”. Shudder has its ups and downs, both literally and figuratively; the album starts off strong with “Boy”, which picks up nicely, where the band’s previous album, The Walking Wounded, left off. The 12 songs on Shudder make up a collective whole with remnants of albums in the past, though not as anthemic as some of their previous work. “The Ghost of St. Valentine”, one of my personal favorites from the album, is a song about being stuck thinking about why a relationship went sour and kicking oneself for delving too deep, including the melancholy lyrics, “There is no love just appetite / and it’s consequences keep you up at night. / Well, appetite is lust at best / and it’s up to us to figure out the rest.”
Essentially what makes Long Island-based Bayside such a distinguishable band from a lot of other music out there, is front man Anthony Ranieri’s heartbreaking lyrics intertwined with tremendous apathy. The song “I Think I’ll Be OK”, one that was demoed on their tour earlier this year with Alkaline Trio, can be found on YouTube, and gave fans (or members of the ‘Bayside Cult’) a taste of what was to come on the new album. If you know Bayside at all, you know that most of the songs that Bayside writes are introspective; the songs hardly remark about the world, but rather the hopeless relationships and personal failures that are being grappled with. But again, the songs end up on a positive note, especially on Shudder, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Shudder, overall, is about happiness over heartbreak, and finding yourself in the world and realizing your place in it. The album drops September 30th on Victory Records.
