boston is a weird place – what once was the “city on a hill” and the guiding light of british new world colonialism is now an awkward-yet-harmonious hodgepodge of small suburbs euphemistically dubbed “neighborhoods” (too proud to call ’em burrows?) that can sweep you from the garish shopping mecca at the heart of town through clusters of crumbling ancient buildings and out to the filthy richest suburbs in new england in one agonizing traffic jam. there are also untold thousands of constantly overturning college students assiduously preventing gentrification of the affordable neighborhoods (not many left of those these days either) through their dedication to keeping them shitty. living there can be weird too.

i’m staying alive cause it seemed more scary to die

there’s a lot of frustration in places like boston, and FAT HISTORY MONTH embody that frustration pretty fuckin’ beautifully. each song is a roiling burst of the sardonic frustration that accompanies the transition to “the unmagnificent lives of adults.” there are echoes of lots of the old “alternative” standbys – sonic youth, modest mouse, pavement, and definitely some modest mouse – and the immediacy of the sound at once parodies the “disaffected” attitude that embodied alternative as a hip marketing strategy in the prosperous 90’s and reappropriates it as a logical emotional response to the present era’s state of “fucking despair” (incidentally an earlier FHM album title).

blackholes suck but i eat light too

but don’t let me overthink this shit. this is the sound of two late-twentysometimes making a hell of a brotherly racket of distinctive imagination. the songs are dark, gamey, they twist and buckle and dissolve and explode unpredictably. the lyrics are obliquely affecting, not music to read or fuck by but perfect for days like today (look outside, motherfucker!). these guys are exemplary players in a thriving scene, fine torch-bearers of the secret tradition of boston indie rock, and let’s face it, make a damn good soundtrack to the rise of the generation defined by burdensome debt and crushing disappointment.

happy wednesday fellow waste!

lizzie