The Everything Is Noise group chat is predictably chaotic, mostly overrun with Bandcamp links and in-jokes so obtuse that explaining them would take the full length of this review. However, there are occasional moments of blindingly good cultural commentary, like this one from Editor-in-Chief Toni:
‘In the face of social abyss and cultural horrors beyond imagination, all we want is to re-live that feeling when our world was way smaller and our problems more manageable, so nostalgia it is.’
Man. Yeah. It does seem like every band from the aughts or earlier is touring again, that we’re getting a lot of new music that sounds like old music, and that the unbelievable slog of Stranger Things is finally about to end. It’s a double-edged sword; sometimes revisiting the past is comforting and nice, and sometimes it feels like a gross and blatant cash grab. There is also the impossible, secret third thing: that you can heavily draw on nostalgia for your artwork, but inject enough ingenuity and contemporary sensibility where it feels both familiar and not. It’s a hard task. And Liquid Mike are up for it on their sixth release, Hell Is An Airport.
The first seconds of Hell Is An Airport give you a pretty good glimpse into what you’re in for for the next 27 minutes: some extremely solid pop punk with sprinkles of garage rock and midwest emo for good measure. The Get Up Kids hang heavy over this album, as do blink-182, and contemporaries Militarie Gun are certainly present as well. The dual inspirations–new vs old–are right on theme with the rest of this work.
Many of the songs off Hell Is An Airport remain firmly in the alt-rock/pop-punk sphere, but what makes this album feel a bit juicier and more modern is the more experimental instrumentation on a few of them. “Selling Swords,” which is a huge standout, goes full-on 1997 radio hit with twangy acoustic guitars and some cheeky little horns. Lead single “AT&T” showcases singer Mike Maple’s crystal clear, soaring tenor overtop wobbly synths reminiscent of Neutral Milk Hotel. It’s a nice balancing act of keeping things in a familiar pocket while stepping out just enough to retain interest.
Liquid Mike are as committed to highly compact songs (fourteen in the already-short runtime; most of these don’t crack two minutes) as they are to catchy riffs. The ungodly fun main melody of “Crop Circles” is mirrored in both the vocals and lead guitar. “’99” cranks up the volume and tempo a bit to create a rolling, Weezer-ian central hook that has not left my head since it dropped. The breakneck pace of the album kept me on my toes a lot of the time, because the moment I thought I’d gotten my claws into a track, it would be over, and on to the next. Usually, I would find that obnoxious, but here, it works.
The lyrical fare is pretty standard for the genre; small town sucks, getting old sucks, getting jaded sucks, etc. All of that is completely fine by me, because Liquid Mike manage to remain achingly sincere and avoid the overwrought or the juvenile. Much of this is likely due to the fact that they’re from East Dickhole, Michigan, so their Midwestern angst is entirely genuine and earned. Maple also has a knack for landing emotional gut punches by way of distinct imagery and a healthy dose of cynicism. “Double Dutch” opens with ‘Out of touch out-of-towner / Buying fruit just to watch it turn browner’; “Groucho Marx” proclaims ‘Nothing here ever gets too bad / just don’t go looking for an explanation’. Hell, dude, just look at the entirety of “Gram AM”:
‘What are you running from
A middle-aged Houdini
Locked ice box
Works hard to take it easy
Smoking pyramids
Blowing perfect circles
In a Grand Am
Until his face turns purple
Don’t make a prick out of me
You made a prick out of me’
It’s kind of hard to explain why such succinct wording hits so hard, but I think the beauty is in the brevity. You gotta keep things tight when your songs are only 90-odd seconds, after all. ‘There’s not much to do now but fold the laundry.’
What I thought about more than anything, though, while listening to Hell Is An Airport on repeat for like, four hours, was my own teenage years spent in East Dickhole, New York. “Instantly Wasted” steamrolled me so intensely that it conjured this maybe-false sense memory of being in someone’s basement that I had no fucking business being in, watching my friends drink their dad’s liquor and playing pool and trying not to scratch up the felt. It smelled like snowmobile gas and everyone’s horrible Britney Spears perfume. And I don’t know what exactly we were listening to, but it was some shittier version of Hell Is An Airport. It appears I’ve been successfully nostalgia baited, but it’s nice to have an actually good album to play in that freeze-frame.
