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DAILY RECORD: Smoking Popes

Posted by: Necci – Apr 12, 2011

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Smoking Popes - This Is Only A Test (Asian Man)

Smoking Popes’ mid-‘90s albums Born to Quit and Destination: Failure meant the world to punks with sappy streaks. I remember my friends laughing at me for playing the “Just broke up with my girlfriend” song during a... breakup with a girlfriend. Another friend met a boyfriend through a zine-trading network, and later wrote about driving around North Carolina with this guy, playing Popes tapes in the car. Smoking Popes were there for sentimental young people who didn’t want to shed their rocking veneer.

Smoking Popes’ music was that of a guitar band punking up classic pop chord progressions, and topping them off with nasal, crooning vocals. They sounded like Sammy Davis Jr. singing for The Ramones. After their late-‘90s breakup, the emo pop sound that they helped pioneer blew up, and they reformed in 2005. This Is Only A Test, a concept album about life in high school, is their second proper full-length since reuniting.

The idea of a band of forty year old men writing an album about teenagers can be troubling, especially if a big part of that band’s appeal is the timelessness of their lyrics. On 1995’s “Need You Around,” they sung, “If I could change one thing in this world, I’d change your mind and make you my girl.” What made that so awesome was that Chet Baker or Sam Cooke could just as easily have sung those words, but they didn’t. Instead, people from our little punk world came up with that great turn of phrase. Now, in 2011, the same band sings, “Playing in a punk band.” It clunks because it’s as broad as their old lyrics, but sounds as sincere as a cast number in a musical about punk teenagers. Songs such as “College” read like mawkish theatrical soliloquies, and beg for a spotlight shining on stage at bespectacled Joe Emo, alone in his bedroom, quaking at the sight of the approaching adult world. Sometimes the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Emo High School” shtick works, in spite of all of the cheese. “I’ve Got Mono,” spiritual cousin to old favorite “Rubella,” is a comical song about being too sick to go see some bands with your friends. “Diary of a Teen Tragedy” uses girl-group spoken word during the verses, then explodes into a big, distorted chorus.

For the most part, the music on This Is Only A Test sticks to the Popes’ pop-punk formula, and when they digress it is with mixed results. The Nirvana riff on “Freakin’ Out” results in a crunchy slice of ‘90s power pop and the cello on “Letter to Emily” closes the album on a pretty note. However, the thin Casio beat on “Excuse Me, Coach” sinks the album’s most beautiful vocal.

The Popes have used lyrical conceits before. Failure came out after vocalist Josh Caterer’s religious conversion, and the bulk of that album’s excellent songs are ambiguous, leaving the listener wondering if they are about girls or Jesus. Unfortunately, while listening to This Is Only A Test, the question isn’t who the songs are about, but if we believe the songs. I wondered if my dislike of musicals skewed my take on This Is Only A Test, and enlisted the help of my friend May Roberston, who likes The Smoking Popes AND musical theater. What follows is her opinion of the album:

Normally when I hear a band called “show-tunesy” I have to resist rolling my eyes because the statement is probably being made by someone who has no interest in musicals. Usually they’re just saying that the music is overly orchestrated, overproduced, or has too many “anthems.” I figured This Is Only A Test would be a similar case, until I got to the song “College” and could immediately see a lone teenager standing on a blacked out stage, hands at his side and belting plaintively. In the musical world, shows like RENT and Spring Awakening definitely and successfully borrow from the pop-punk tradition. I don’t know that The Smoking Popes intended to borrow back from musicals, but with songs like “Diary of a Teen Tragedy” and “Punk Band,” I have to wonder.

High school isn’t so far in the past that I’m eager to reminisce, and This Is Only A Test puts a big bright spotlight on some of those moments that could only be so dramatic when I was sixteen. And I’m not sure the spotlight is particularly flattering in this case. While some of the songs, like “How Dangerous,” pull off the frenzy of friendships and romances and expectations, others just make those high school standards seem dorkier than I remember them being. That said, the “Test” is not a total failure, and I don’t see The Smoking Popes' music being transformed into a pop-punk Mamma Mia production anytime soon.

By Chris Terry and May Robertson


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