igh school sucked for everyone.



Those four years were mostly pomp and noise, tiny dramas made significant only through the fetters of a ridiculous 5-day schedule. It’s no surprise that the appending music has always been experientially isomorphic; each lyric, note, and guitar strum matches perfectly the tepid, unimaginative adventures of pressured 15-year old cheerleaders. Nonetheless, it’d be jejune to discard the weight of the experience merely because Korn and American Hi-Fi are so hell-bent on idealizing it.

I applied that same restraint to Abandoned Pools’ debut album Humanistic, trying instead to gauge the merits of suburban chants and songs of fatuous love on deeper levels—if that was really even possible. At times the album admittedly sank to nothing but some B-sides off a Laguna Beach mixtape, but it was salvaged by a sufficient attempt at pliability with the perfectly bland soundscape of pop-rock. Tommy Walters would sift one element or the other like the poppy “Ruin Your Life” or the chug rock of “Seed” so it wouldn’t flow into one indecipherable mess.

So what’s happened one EP and an album later? Well, high school’s back, but this time around Walters tries to answer some Big Questions. Now, I have no qualms with high school music that actually deals with high school, but it’s the attempt to parse and present the bigger world with the same tools that sets the theater of Armed to The Teeth on wobbly legs. I didn’t listen to the album expecting the Cartesian Meditations of pop-rock, but the effort to make large philosophical pronouncements comes off just as naïvely.

There are two solid arcs Armed to The Teeth seeks to articulate: the first deals with standard fare interrelations, not quite reaching the summit of Mount Emo but scaling a similar objective nonetheless. Their success comes from hammering out meaty mini-theaters that, while simplistic overall, are still solid. Once in a while Walters will actually even supersede the hackneyed content like on “Hunting (The Universe Breaks My Heart)” and “Goodbye Song,” both consisting of palatable pop-rock but whose lyrics offer healthy room for interpretation. Then again you have a complete reversion to the stuff Gilmore Girls scripts are made of like “Tighter Noose,” “Catalyst,” and “Sailing Seas” which include gems like, “You’re so weak / Beat up a Geek / Makes you complete” and “I wish I could taste something beautiful / To make you fall in love again / But love has slowly faded away / Like sparklers shining into space.”

The second arc, of course, deals with The Big Questions. You know, the depraved corporate life (“Armed to The Teeth”) or, I shit you not, “rappers in their limousines / Who just want to be loved” (“Renegade”). The annoyance of this arc is luckily reduced by the generally accomplished musicianship which, even though lineup changes reduced the four-piece to a trio, sounds significantly heavier than their debut. The ensuing problem, then, is that you can only really enjoy the music if you devalue or empty entirely the content so that your sole appreciation is based on attractive but unoriginal playing. It’s nice, but nothing lingers.

The album doesn’t explicitly speak of high school, sure. But the source can easily be divined from the content whenever it emerges, which isn’t even necessarily the problem. Every album has a particularly optimal range, and sometimes the artist must be satisfied with inhabiting that particular space. This is the reason why Limp Bizkit had no fucking business switching to national politics from Nookie or why Starsailor went from maudlin to just sucking a fat one. Armed to The Teeth is robust in many respects, offering a series of fundamentally agreeable tunes. But, as previously described, the skewed or plainly incompatible content limits agreeability on a general level.