Modern Life is War are flirting with a backlash. Plenty of people hated Witness despite the fact that it upped the ante on My Love. My Way. like a gambler splashing the pot, with songs that stood taller, lingered in your head longer, and cut like a Bowie knife (i.e. through human flesh). But still we hear the same old line about how everything was better back then, like a Judeo-Christian creation myth adapted for whiny punk rockers: linear time and new records only take us further from some Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve trade test pressings and monkey wrench their fixed gear bikes at the vegan potluck.
So of course, being the contrary son of a bitch that I am, I wanted this to be the greatest album ever, just so I could rub all the naysayers' faces in it like a puddle of puppy piss. I find myself rooting for Modern Life is War: maybe it's their outsider authenticity (few bands have seemed more like a S.E. Hinton novel come to life), or their killer live shows, or the way that they alienated cringe-inducing post-punk wannabes Some Girls, but I find them an easy band to go to bat for. And so I wanted this record to be the ne plus ultra of Modern Life is War records, a white-hot, proletarian punk rock pipe bomb, wiping smirks off faces and inspiring much bedroom moshing across America.
And the truth is that, at first, it sounds like a disappointment. Where Witness sounded bulletproof and hungry, Midnight in America feels broken and disjointed, a set of bleak, frustrated dirges that crawl to nowhere, building up but rarely catching fire. The album's sense of frustration comes out even in the vocal phrasing, which is often surprisingly awkward compared to past records. Singer Jeffrey Eaton has always written dense, literate lyrics, but here you can almost hear him struggling to pack his lines into these misshapen songs as they rumble by in fits and starts. (There's also a few more backing vocals than I would like; Eaton's strangled shout is so perfect for this band that anything else feels out of place.)
Which is not to say it's a bad record; far from it. Appropriately, the album's highlight is the song that's already alienated plenty of message board tastemakers: "Stagger Lee." Modern Life is War contribute much more to the American folk idiom than Nick Cave's cabaret grotesquerie or The Clash's world music jive: their "Stagger Lee" is a chugging black hole, baleful as hell and sounding the way a song about murder should, with vocalist/method actor Jeffrey Eaton growling his way through an icy, slate-grey landscape of sin and vice. Simply calling it a cover misses the point; as much as anybody who's picked up the amorphous folktale, Modern Life is War make Stagger Lee's story their own. No other song on the record hits its mark nearly so well.
One of the best things about MLIW has always been Jeffrey Eaton's lyrics, and he rabble-rouses like Huey Long here, carving a real niche for himself as a poet of youthful spiritual malaise in post-industrial industrial America. (I can easily see young punks getting hip to this record and faking proletarian, in the time-honored tradition.) I've got a real soft spot for "These Mad Dogs of Glory," where Eaton raises a glass to his spiritual predecessors, ranging from Sylvia Plath to Federico Garcia Lorca. Unlike many lyricists, when Eaton salutes his literary heroes, it actually feels natural and unaffectedit's worlds away from The Hold Steady name-dropping Sal Paradise, a move that may well be completely sincere but nonetheless feels designed to win over rock critics with English degrees. (As ever, Eaton seems uninterested in trying to impress anybody: how many punks are really going to give a shit about Lorca's death at the hands of Francoists in the early days of the Spanish Civil War?)
Midnight in America is definitely the kind of record whose dimensions grow with each listen, and in all honesty very few other punk bands are capable of making such focused, personal statements. But it's nonetheless a mixed bag, sounding like Modern Life is War are feeling out the contours of their own aesthetic, sometimes succeeding ("Stagger Lee", the churning "Big City Dream", the grueling-but-expansive title track) and sometimes not - songs like "Humble Streets" work up a skillful-but-monotone rage that sounds a lot more boilerplate than this band's best work would ever lead you to expect. It isn't a bad record, but it's a difficult one because I'm convinced this band can do better, like the crusty mentor who always gives the most grief to his favorite student.
But like Bruce Wayne once said of Harvey Dent, I believe in Modern Life is War. Midnight in America isn't the masterstroke I was hoping for, but it's still a gutsy, impassioned album that unmasks a lot of today's so-called hardcore for the emotionally tawdry and contrived tripe that it is. Besides, I'm sure the band would instruct their detractors to take a page from anti-antiquarian anthem "Fuck the Sex Pistols": "We don't care what you think. We don't care what you say. You don't get to decide."
