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This band name sucks because it’s impossible to look up anything about them without landing on actual freaking pigeons.
But damn… God Damn their music is so good. I forgive them.

They’re like the perfect amalgamation of all the embarrassing folk punk and emo songs I used to love listening to with noise rock and heavy metal elements painted over top. It’s like a genuinely perfectly executed mishmash of genres - it feels so familiar and comfortable to me across so many years - and while I’m feeling so frustrated with my silly little life right now, the aggression and sadness is so welcomed. I’m unsure if I would enjoy it as much as I do during any other time in the history of my existence, but as of now it's joining my awesome coveted 5/5 albums.

I’ve historically really struggled to get into metal music, I either have some problem with the vocalist’s voice as I think a lot of them blend together for me, and the screaming/growling can be really hit or miss, or the lyrical content just isnt there - I don’t know why so much of it leans into graphic content, or satanic or anti-religious themes (which is based, may I iterate, but like at some point I get the freaking idea) - there doesn’t seem to be much variety or things I can really connect with. Maybe I’ve had a bad run looking into bands (save for my dearest, sweetest, Narasaki), but this has more or less been my experience - cool as hell instrumental elements, really testing vocals.

But, this album kind of solves all of that for me!
I guess it’s not a traditional metal record, to be fair, but I think the riffs and song structures lean enough in that direction to really scratch that itch for me, all the while two fantastic singers sing over the top of them - one being Micah who has really lovely clean vocals and an equally awesome screaming voice, and Valerie who has the sweetest softest singing which often times sing over the top of one another and compliment each other really well and really interestingly.

Another boy girl singing duo from San Francisco … one Literally named Valerie too… I sure hope I never discover anything deeply disturbing happening from this band ^_^

I love basically every track, save for the opener Worms which is probably the most straight-forwardly emo sounding, though It does have some interesting switchups. A lot of these songs feature these tempo changes and switch ups, actually, and turn even standard length 3 minute tracks into a melting pot of different, somehow still functioning ideas all crammed together.

One of my favourite songs, Spike ♥ Julia 4 EVA is a really really good example of this, beginning slowly with soft and vulnerable sounding vocals over a fairly simple and clean background riff, before exploding into a faster paced screamo section from the same vocalist, coming in and out of basically just wailing about how much he’s suffering (I think? Tough to make out much of the lyrics while hes freaking screaming) all the while Valerie is just sweetly swinging in the background “iiiii doooont neeeed uuuu ^_^”. I’m not usually a fan of harsher vocals like this, and it does sound a bit silly to me still when first introduced in this song, but then literally right after the chorus and especially after the second toward the end of the song he uses it to resolve the section so insanely well and satisfyingly - the song itself deconstructs and is stripped back to really sludgy guitar picking before ending softly again, like the great release and aftermath of energy rargrgghhghhhhjjjh.............. It's so good.

The song title being a reference to Cowboy Bebop’s Spike and Julia also earns it bonus points from a refined weeaboo such as myself, and I think helps to contextualise the relationship written about in the lyrics of this song. Maybe Micah and Valerie are both playing the role of a would-be Spike and Julia, in how only one can’t really live without the other, and kind of lives to meet them again, living some ghost life, and then when they do they freaking die within hours of eachother, unhappily, without resolution. But I don’t really know. I wish these guys released ANY official lyrics to these songs so I could make a better guess. C'est la vie.

My favourite song from this album is definitely California (Is For Fuckers) though. I love the way it explodes into noisier guitars, and all of the different transitions and tempo changes through the song are all so satisfying. The sound of the guitarist sweeping down the strings for each chord toward the end tickles my brain in ways I cannot describe. Lyrically it seems pretty straight-forwardly about how bad California is and how poorly it treats them (very much like the Grimes song sharing the same name. What the hell is happening in California…), or whatever it is used as an allegory for.

Kafka Does His Shopping From Home is also crazy good, and while I can’t really make out many of the lyrics the song title alone paints a pretty good picture. From my very rudimentary research on Kafka following hearing this and how neurotic he was, they’re right, he totally would do his shopping from home.
Maybe he would not have starved … hehe.

The latter half of the album really slows down (save for the last song which has a riff that has me giving shakas and saying words like “gnarly”), and while it's generally not as exciting, it has most of the clearest vocals and a lot of the lyrics reveal themselves to be quite depressing. Could Be The Last Time is my favourite in this vein, with it being about letting go and all the apprehension and fear that comes with that.

I’m getting quite conscious about the length of this so I’ll cut it off here. For all of my turmoil and despair, I’m at least glad to have experienced it so that I could truly enjoy an album like Might As Well Go Eat Worms to such an extent.

Maybe I should indulge in some myself … might as well, as they say .
and they are truly saying this.