ALBUM REVIEW: From Exile – The Menzingers
For pretty much everyone around the world, 2020 has been an absolute write-off, to put things mildly, with the music industry being in particular being dealt essentially a full shutdown since around the end of March. Pennsylvania punks THE MENZINGERS were one of many bands still on tour up to that point, having completed a Jan/Feb European trek in support of last year’s much-praised sixth album Hello Exile and just getting underway with an AUS/NZ run, the latter part of which was subsequently pulled, along with their entire summer tour plans.
Faced with the ever-growing prospect of losing an entire album cycle’s worth of touring as time rolled on, the band; vocalists/guitarists Greg Barnett and Tom May, bassist Eric Keen and drummer Joe Godino instead decided to work on something rather different to pass the time – reworking that album entirely in isolation from their bedrooms for a record that’s come to be known as the fittingly-titled From Exile.
Right from the off, opener America encapsulates the overall tone of this sonic transformation fairly well, trading in the driving power-chords of the original for a jaunty acoustic guitar-led bounce. It’s an incredibly different and more laid-back vibe, but one that fits the band surprisingly well throughout. Of course, this still being a THE MENZINGERS record means listeners are still very much in for a huge dose of the singalong choruses they know and love, and even in this form From Exile delivers.
Songs like Anna and High School Friend (the latter even seeing Barnett going full western and playing harmonica amidst a newly country-ified musical canvas) still sound as brilliant as they did in their amped-up original forms. Strawberry Mansion meanwhile, sees fellow vocalist/guitarist Tom May take the lead on a brilliantly summery-feeling number that masks some of the record’s most overtly-political leanings outside of America, as May croons of “the fool’s coronation” and being “exiled to an island of plastic” in several biting, if not-exactly subtle jabs at both President Trump and the regressive environmental policies put out by his Republican party in the last several years.
On the slower end of things, May’s other songwriting contribution Last To Know, and the haunting (and now perhaps incredibly apt for many of us in 2020) I Can’t Stop Drinking both gain some gorgeously-arranged violin from Kayleigh Goldsworthy, while the anthemic Strangers Forever becomes an echo-drenched ballad of titanic proportions. Former title-track Hello Exile meanwhile, fares similarly well around the record’s midpoint; transformed fully into a slow-burn acoustic ballad you always got the sense it could work as. That these work just as well as their faster counterparts, if not more so at times, is testament to the brilliant songwriting capability of Barnett, May and their bandmates; able to craft universally-great melodies to a frankly ridiculous degree of consistency, and arguably channelling Nebraska-era BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN a lot more than you might expect.
Like most ‘rework’ albums, how much you get out of From Exile will likely depend on both how you felt about Hello Exile, and your inclination towards acoustic guitars and tinges of country music. THE MENZINGERS might be a band most revered for crafting emotionally-affecting punk rock songs to drink to while bellowing along, but From Exile is undoubtedly an impressively-crafted and highly successful alternate take from the Pennsylvania collective and producer Will Yip on what was one of last year’s most enjoyable rock records, giving the band’s emotional lyricism more room to breathe than ever, and providing an enjoyably relaxing listen that feels incredibly welcome in these strange and often-tense times.
Rating: 7/10
From Exile is out now via Epitaph Records.
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