"Sick of All the Same Songs"

Every pop-punk act has their one acoustic song, a chance to show a side slightly more sensitive than a toilet seat. Your “Good Riddance”, your “Swing Life Away”. Something simple enough to strum along while smoking. Sentiment at an all time high, most often a plea for a love otherwise repudiated across the rest of the record. These are equally often anthems to friendship—see “Living Room Song” by The Wonder Years. They become fan favorites, usually after an artist has established their full band full bore distortion pedal sound.

Man Overboard’s canonical contribution to the category is undoubtedly, “Love Your Friends, Die Laughing”. Yet their catalogue contains several other admirable entries worth considering. Their debut album’s closer, “Sidekick,” slaps a cajon and my shit. “Dear You” is also Good—as if naming your band after a legendary 90’s band’s song wasn’t enough, might as well do another.

My favorite of these opens their acoustic EP Noise From Upstairs released a few months before their full length. “Cry Baby” uses a couple more than three chords, and a wonderfully low-fi drum kit. It begins with the sound of a distant siren—police or ambulance it’s hard to say, only that whatever danger is far-off and retreating. There’s a safety at the fading sound, a comfort in coming close to something worse that quickly and cleverly sets the tone. It’s a song and scene set in the late night, a bedroom serenade to and audience of one.

There’s no chorus, just a great crescendo to shout.

I’ll be honest, I know Man Overboard has two singers, but I have never been able to tell who is who despite a decade-plus of regular listening, I’m sorry. They’re both punchy disciples from the Tom Delonge school of stuffed-nose singing, and they graduated with honors. The transition from their anguished cry to a genuinely beautiful fingerpicked bridge is the kind of sit up straight and listen moment that artists live for. Even without the other variations of the familiar form, this blossoming sets the song apart from its peers.

While I personally prefer the full-band version of “Love Your Friends, Die Laughing”, I don’t think “Cry Baby” would be improved by more muscular instrumentation. It’s the four-track simplicity that adds such shine to that standout guitar lick.

I love the self-deprecation as badge-of-honor titling an introspective song “Cry Baby”. Both the derogatory “crybaby” and the command to go ahead and cry, baby. I’m a sucker for spacing!

And what a mood these lines are:

Sleepycore hive stand up! Or lay down, that’s ok too.

Emo acoustics love to end on certainty of sentiment. The love venerated. The grief eternal. I love the deviance of this one, to land on uncertainty.

Of course this comes after “And I’ve lived at the end of what was once a beautiful world”, so maybe that ambiguity isn’t so… ambiguous. Though the world keeps ending, we keep living. I like how his delivery (whichever ambiguous (!) singer it is) suggests some acceptance of this uncertainty. To be content with the journey, that at least feels novel to the genre.

Next week marks a year of this newsletter. We covered a sum of 41 songs since starting out. That’s pretty cool! Thanks as always for reading.