Welcome, Change

New Year’s Eve came with fireworks like it does every year, and the surprise release from Detroit Bad Boys, Fireworks. The new record rules, and if I had a dollar for every time this band released something titled from a song not actually on that album, I would have two dollars. “Demitasse,” their first single in 5 years, is a perfect song. It’s one of the only uses of a children’s choir I can condone. The song, circling the drain of a father’s death, picks up where 2014’s Oh, Common Life left off.

At their first hometown show in 8 years, Fireworks opened for The Wonder Years, and they stole the show. People with receding hairlines and bad backs went fucking feral. I know we all joke about the dedication of elder scene kids, promising to go hard in the pit at the My Chem reunion, and no disrespect but I went to that tour too and we all had a great time, but we had nothing on the Fireworks diehards. Crowdsurfers atop the shoulders of DEFEND POP-PUNK soldiers looking like the battering ram from Helm’s Deep, aiming straight for the stage. A mosh pit blooming with smiles, sweat, something on the edge of insanity.

They played “Run, Brother, Run,” in the middle of their set, which could’ve closed out Oh, Common Life, and no one would’ve batted an eye. It’s a heart-wrenching lament to McKinder’s late namesake. My dad’s health wasn’t great around 2014, and I had this horrible fear that because of this song, he would die when I turned 25. I’m relieved to report that didn’t happen. But holy hell man, how does anyone follow up the saddest song they’ve ever written?

Enter “The Hotbed of Life”. It was Fireworks’ imperfect exit from a scene that felt jam-packed. Just look at the bill for their last tour: Modern Baseball, Citizen, Real Friends, and The Wonder Years. The Midwest-Emo revival seemed at its peak in 2014. That tour was The Wonder Years’ victory lap following The Greatest Generation, one of my favorite albums. I wept through the show’s finale, the first, and certainly not the last time, live music would overpower me so totally. In an interview with Stereogum promoting their latest release, Fireworks’ singer David McKinder confesses he and the band felt out of place on that tour, neither young upstarts, or future elder-statesmen of the scene. But let me tell you, they played like their lives depended on it.

For me, these two final songs are inextricable. I used to time my late-night drives home to make sure they would play right before I pulled into the driveway. They’re both about the exhaustion of ageing, of grief, and all the things sadness sours. They use similar motifs and moves. Big opening drum fill, somber church organ bridges. Each invokes the father’s death only once, and quickly pivots to describe a fizzling romance.

In “Run, Brother, Run”,

Then in “The Hotbed of Life”,

In the first he sounds resigned to the haunting of an ailing heart. In the latter, he’s incredulous at his own grief, like “Is this really where my mind is going to always go?” This whole verse in “Hotbed” jars against my ear, the image is strained, the meter a little off, the injection of “my dead dad’s house” comes almost out of nowhere. It’s not exactly epic poetry, it’s just painful truth. And yet I love this effect, because it enters so unwanted and impossible to ignore, the same way death and grief are such surprise guests.

What is poetry to me: the chorus.

Slammed doors, self-pity, and adolescent rage are the purview of Pop-punk. Maybe those sentiments, with their expression so easily parried, aren’t what the singer is seeking after all. “Doors are meant to close, but I don’t want to.” He seems suspicious of his own maxim. If something refuses to be finished, is there even a door to slam? I don’t think he’s looking to wallow, just fallen victim to that late stage of grief, where we believe we must be done with it, and therefore linger at what we think is the threshold, because giving up grief means giving up the memory of who we lost. It’s a lie we can’t help believing.

The song is up-tempo, as all Fireworks’ closers are. It does that tango between upbeat music and soul-crushing lyrics so well. When that gentle organ-synth comes through on the bridge, you know you’re in for one more somber note.

Everyone keeps a stiff upper lip until the irrevocability of time shows up. There’s a lump in my throat every time I sing along, and I can imagine why they don’t really play this one live. “Run, Brother, Run” has some cataclysmic catharsis behind it, but “Hotbed” stares into the sun. After all the dark that precedes it, the light is no relief.

Happy new year, friends. I think this one has some welcome change in store. At the very least, this new album does. “The Hotbed of Life” comes from the Larry McMurtry novel All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers. Don’t be a stranger.