Album review: The Menzingers – Everything I Ever Saw

Few contemporary bands capture life in America as accurately as The Menzingers. That’s because the Scranton band’s natural proclivity for nostalgia and looking back means their songs always straddle the line between past and the present, all of both and none of one. As a result, their melodic punk reflects both the macro and the micro, the universal and the personal. You get the country as a whole told through the very specific, individual experiences of co-frontmen Tom May and Greg Barnett.

They've been doing it for years, as well. On their raw and roughshod 2010 second album Chamberlain Waits, the pair often found themselves simultaneously navigating then and now. On that album's track Time Tables, Greg opens with, ‘Once she came like a vision in the night/I fell in love before the morning arrived.’

Sixteen years later, he’s repurposed and updated that lyric on When She Enters My Dreams, from this eighth album. A song more akin to Bruce Springsteen, it packs as much power in its wistful, jaded nostalgia. It’s not the only time The Menzingers reference themselves on this album. On Romanticism, they (kind of) do it again, invoking Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel #2, a song they paid tribute to and (kind of) remade on Sun Hotel, from 2012's On The Impossible Past.

It works well The Menzingers have been around long enough now to be able to do so with heart and feeling. Neither song comes off as trite or self-aware, which is a problem the band have occasionally encountered in the past.

Everything I Ever Saw suffers no such shortcomings. Greg and Tom open up freely about happenings in their own lives, notably how the former has got married and had his first child, while the latter got divorced. The juxtaposition between the pair’s experiences is all on this album, good and bad, mixing and muddling the two until there’s little distinction.

It’s appropriate, then, that the title-track ends the album with a burst of emotional hope and fragility that seems to take account of, well, everything the band ever saw. It’s a majestic, formidable end to a marvellous record. Not even the one duff track, The Fool – which sounds slightly like a parody of The Steve Miller Band’s The Joker – can dull the intense emotional impact, nor stop it claiming a stake as one of The Menzingers’ very best.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: The Gaslight Anthem, Spanish Love Songs, Hot Mulligan

Everything I Ever Saw is released on July 17 via Epitaph