#2758 Jeff Rosenstock - Post-

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As America inaugurated its first fascist, I wondered what music would come out of 2017. I hoped it would be furious, that "this would be great for the punk scene". But the dread was just too big. All the rock and roll was hopeless, defeated. Arcade Fire, LCD, and whatever was left of the 00's stalwarts put out rundown albums, and rock in general shriveled into a raisin in the fetal position.

WORRY was the best album of 2016, when America was just holding the gun to its head, and maybe it wasn't going to pull the trigger. It was angry and stressed, but had hope. Differencemaking seemed possible.

It feels intentional that POST came out on January 1st, 2018. It's a slow, cold dawning, just the barest break from black. Rosenstock talked about how he wanted to make an ambient album* and there's vestiges of that idea here; mullfull scenes wander through the album's epic-length bookends. USA uses its seven minutes to honor how long and hopeless every day feels, to give you time to muster a spark, and spends its last couple minutes fanning it for all its worth. Closing track Let Them Win sends you back into the world across 11:00, with a message that we can't give up, even as it twinkles off into wobbly surrender itself. It's a gorgeous, conflicted, exhausted call to arms.

In between, there's some good pop-punk fun, all frustration and regret, Pinkerton if it was about a country instead of a girl. There're songs called
 - Powerlessness
 - All this Useless Energy
 - And Beating My Head Against the Wall
and none of them are depressing, or uplifting, or angry, exactly, they're just Jeff shouting about how it is, tapping into a new kind of quasi-teenage (Jeff's my age (old)) frustration in plainspoken terms.

Where WORRY was blistering and breakneck, POST marshals its strength, and finds only small amounts. But what it finds it shares generously, showering it onto anyone who will listen. And it's still one of the best rock albums I've head in a year or so. Bad times make for worse music, and less appreciation. There're no answers here, Jeff doesn't know anything you don't. This is just the energy to get yourself out of bed. It's a start 4/5

* what i would pay to hear that