Keep This To Yourself

Transit’s Keep This To Yourself is as perfect a pillar of pop punk as can be. Structured as a series of letters never sent, it makes microscopic the anthemic opera typified, oft-mimicked, and never matched in Green Day’s American Idiot. Transit doesn’t bother with the high-flying theatrics, and instead drills down. Caught in the vortex of suicidal suburban sprawl and adolescence ended too soon, they chronicles everyday loss with earnest abandon. Their first record was titled This Will Not Define Us; the second sounds like a band desperate to prove it. The album hurtles towards its own conclusion so breathlessly you won’t even realize twelve songs have sped by. No song makes it past the three-minute mark. Even the understated moments are screamed at full volume.

The finale, “Love, ____”, brings it all home. That’s the keyword: home. Nothing more pop punk than hating your hometown, yet this song opens with a heart-in-my-hands declaration of love:

“I always knew that I would live and die in Boston.

When I was five I put my hands into cement and you knelt beside me.

It dried up and hardened so fast.”

Singer Joe Boynton is exactly how his name sounds, a bouncy, smile-through-the-sad-songs, string-bean kind of guy. He always looks like he’s trying to convince himself of his band’s own seriousness, and struggling because he’s having such a good time.

The song’s narrator describes leaving and never coming back. At least not until the final verse, when he’s returned and his hands no longer fit the mold made so long ago. It’s not a complex metaphor. It doesn’t need to be when it’s told so guilelessly. I was this person. I thought I would always be this person. I was wrong about that, but I was right about where my home is.

Even the line “Oh my god, why is the world so sad?” cringe in its naked naivety can’t drag the song down. The double-time fills on drum and bass buoy the second chorus’ conviction, then sudden staggered rests at the chorus’ close make your heart skip a beat too.

During the bridge Transit’s secret weapon shows out: Tim Landers, whose alley cat yowl should be ranked alongside Tom Delonge and Brendan Kelly. Throughout Transit’s discography, Landers will butt in halfway through a lyric, cutting Boynton off like the devil’s advocate on your shoulder. Almost always he’s the bearer of bad news, or an inner monologue of self-sabotage. He is the voice of dissonance to Boynton’s pleading direct address. His guitar lines also favor this nasal squall, cutting through the band’s constant power chord churn. Other prime examples of his signature style: “For The World”, “You Can’t Miss It”, and “Burn Out” from his other band, the criminally underrated Misser. (I can’t say anything about Tim Landers without invoking the “Alone, die” with the absolute pettiest chorus I’ve ever heard, “I’m going to move to the west coast and you’re gunna die alone!”)

The song finishes with a lone acoustic guitar and fireside chorus. It’s exactly the kind of sing-along ending meant to close out shows. You even have to forgive the cheesy sound effects of a lighter flicking and crumpling of paper, as this last epistolary missive to is consigned to the figurative fire. That’s the catharsis Transit captures here, the things you can’t say to someone no longer in your life, and so instead you sing around a fire with friends whose voices all run together.

Transit called it quits in 2016. A few years later, Tim Landers died. It’s a sad story and feels like an unfair ending for a band that was central to the contemporary emo revival. In all the record’s eulogizing, literal and metaphorical, the band was predicting their own expiration. It’s a record that left nothing to the imagination; insisted that if this was the last you ever heard of them, you would remember it.

In “For The World”, Landers dominates the bridge, singing,

“Right now it seems all I know and love is gone

except my beat up guitar and unfinished songs.

At least I finished this one.”

Landers was perhaps not an optimist, penning the infectiously catchy and misanthropic “I’m Really Starting To Hope The World Ends in 2012”, but his bandmates certainly made him try out being Mr. Brightside. Before the last chorus in “Love, ____”, while Landers snarls, “I was never any good at saying sorry, thank you for that,” Boynton overpowers him to proclaim, “I’m ready for whatever is coming next.”

What’s next for you? Are you afraid to tell people because you don’t want to jinx it? Email me. I can keep a secret.