Say Anything ...Is Committed (May 24th, 2024) • Page 2

Dog Fish · Mar 18, 2024

If it was 2010, the singles sound like everything I was hoping SA would sound like with every subsequent album

Dog Fish · Mar 18, 2024

For me max falls in the category of Morrissey now. He’s not ruining people’s lives but…why do you have to be you?

SteveLikesMusic · Mar 18, 2024

Dog Fish said:

For me max falls in the category of Morrissey now. He’s not ruining people’s lives but…why do you have to be you?

idunno I think he might be based on some shit I’ve read

Dog Fish · Mar 18, 2024

I mean besides his children

SmashRipsaw · Mar 18, 2024

Isn't he bipolar? That likely explains at least some of his behavior.

SpeckledSouls · Mar 18, 2024

He's an egotistical asshole. Yes, he's bipolar, but that doesn't excuse all his actions.

popdisaster00 · Mar 18, 2024

What in the holy fuck is with those song titles

Twikki · Mar 19, 2024

Why was this announced so prematurely?!

I enjoyed 'Are You In There?' but yeah...not exactly hyped

SteveLikesMusic · Mar 19, 2024

Is this dropping Friday or is that just misleading marketing

Aaron Mook · Mar 19, 2024

SteveLikesMusic said:

Is this dropping Friday or is that just misleading marketing

New single Friday. Album release date is in the thread title.

Dog Fish · Mar 19, 2024

Seriously, I’m more embarrassed with these song titles than I was sneaking home enema of the state 25 years ago

Benjamin Lee · Mar 20, 2024

The first lyric on “I, Vibator” is

“You botched her nut a jillion times
Now she’s gonna get herself off
It may require an army of balls”

I don’t know what I expected but Christ

edit: misheard "botched her nut" as "watched her nut". Honestly not sure which is worse.

Dog Fish · Mar 20, 2024

Max had to have told kind, sweet Fred M. "hey, I'm thinking of making an instrumental album, want to play on it?"

Then PSYCHE!!

Dog Fish · Mar 20, 2024

I mean look at his reaction to "so I fucked her in church" off edging

Aaron Mook · Mar 20, 2024

Benjamin Lee said:

The first lyric on “I, Vibator” is

“You watched her nut a jillion times
Now she’s gonna get herself off
It may require an army of balls”

I don’t know what I expected but Christ

I gotta know where you're seeing this lol

Allhailburnzy · Mar 20, 2024

I just used a VPN not being hyperbolic this might be one of the worst songs I’ve heard at least in a long time

SpeckledSouls · Mar 20, 2024

I'm shocked

Benjamin Lee · Mar 20, 2024

Aaron Mook said:

I gotta know where you're seeing this lol

Dumb little story, but someone on Reddit posted a new Alestorm song but I had to use my VPN set in Australia for it to play, so after listening to it I thought "Might as well check what the new Say Anything will be since I already connected the VPN" and just went to the Say Anything YouTube channel and it was there. Musically it's all over in quality, but it never really comes back lyrically from that abysmal opening.

Aaron Mook · Mar 20, 2024

She shudders like an earthquake
This jew is finna vibrate
Enraptured by her milkshake
I'm the luckiest vibrator in the trough
To help her get herself off

Dog Fish · Mar 20, 2024

Wasn’t there an old shirt that said “Max Bemis taught me more grammar than my English teacher”?

Twikki · Mar 21, 2024

Just a note that it looks like all the song titles are in all caps, just incase you wanted to add to the cringe

gurpgork · Mar 21, 2024

Man I am still optimistic for the album but “I, Vibrator” is truly awful

I don’t know why he thinks others adults need to hear this stuff

Benjamin Lee · Mar 21, 2024

At this point I fully expect “Are You (In) There” to be the only song I enjoy on the album, and the last thing I enjoy by him in general.

Dog Fish · Mar 21, 2024

gurpgork said:

Man I am still optimistic for the album but “I, Vibrator” is truly awful

I don’t know why he thinks others adults need to hear this stuff

The alternative would be he thinks young people/children need to hear this. Both are terrible answers.

Jason Tate · Mar 21, 2024

From the press release:

Speaking on the new song, Bemis writes: “'I, VIBRATOR' is about wanting to be objectified as a righteous tool against the patriarchy for a particular girl to use at will. One great tool for any historically undermined person with a vagina is a disembodied, always-ready penis, a role I'm proud and lucky to play for a certain lady in my life that may have been brought up to believe sex is for dudes and she isn't the one with all the fucking power in the world.”
This dude is so far up his own ass ...

Full thing:

If you predicted a carefree ending, you haven’t been paying attention for the past two decades. Max Bemis was never built to placidly ride off into the sunset to pursue the sedate joys of white picket fence life in small-town Texas. That isn’t to say that he didn’t try. The fact that you’re about to listen to another Say Anything record is the evidence that something went lethally askew. And the tale of the chaos is embedded into the band’s latest sly-but-searing opus …Is Committed.

We last left the band in a different dimension. In 2019, Say Anything released Oliver Appropriate – with Bemis claiming that this meta-fictional critique of mass culture and the band itself would be their last epic. It was admittedly closer to an extended hiatus in the vein of Jay-Z, but the implications were clear. When Bemis co-founded the band in the first years of this hexed century, Say Anything served as a vessel for the most caustic, obscene, and harrowing thoughts of his id. It was something like the pop-punk Portnoy’s Complaint or an emo Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles: artful satire that could double as a wounded confessional.

The post-modern masterpieces of Bemis’ early 20s splintered the lines between hero and anti-hero. Grandiose myths were elaborately constructed only to be savagely punctured. It’s supposed to be funny, but it never was just a joke. But like most creations where the fictional narrator is frequently confused for the artist themselves, the carefully delineated boundaries began to collapse. The character began to seep into real-life and the demons returned. Bemis began to feel like Jerry Seinfeld playing the empathy-averse fictionalized version of himself on Seinfeld.

“There’s a lot of truth in the Say Anything albums, but I was often misperceived by the fans and the press,” Bemis says. “Eventually, I found myself starting to act like the character and it didn’t agree with me. I started wondering if I was a bad person who was completely insane and should be locked in a mental health facility. Or am I flawed but ultimately a good person who has just been writing about himself in very unhealthy ways?”

A semi-permanent sabbatical from the project felt like the most reasonable course of action – especially as Donald Trump rose to power, the crimes of Harvey Weinstein were brought to light, and the rock scene seemed to become more misogynistic. Bemis was now focused on being the best parent possible to his five children and repudiating the occasionally crude jokes and youthful indiscretions of the past. He concentrated on recording solo material and on his second career as a comic book writer.

Then everything began to unravel. The pandemic caused financial and mental health struggles. For most of his adult life, Bemis has publicly grappled with addiction and bipolarity, while his wife and collaborator, Sherri Dupree-Bemis operated as a grounding force. But for the first time, she experienced her own psychological woes, which led him into the unfamiliar position of being a stabilizing figure.

The spiral continued. A few years earlier, the Bemis family relocated to Tyler, Texas, where Dupree was born and raised. As the strife and chaos metastasized, his in-laws began blaming Bemis for the duress. Public accusations were bandied about and family services was called to investigate false claims of his children being at risk. In due time and at great expense, Bemis cleared his family’s name and reputation, but the traumatic effects lingered.

“With my family, I found a place where I was safe, and then someone tried to take it from me,” Bemis says. “I basically turned into Frank Castle from The Punisher. I had to defend my family and hire a lawyer and fight. The experience took a ton out of me. And writing this record helped. I wrote it to save my own life – to remind me that this is what you can’t become.”

The next step required reforming the band. Bemis started by writing an acoustic song and sending it to drummer, Coby Linder, to successfully woo him back into the fold. Everything followed from there.

“I was genuinely feeling these familiar emotions of angst and turmoil – a serious punk anger that I hadn’t felt in a long time.” Bemis recalls.

The track eventually became “PSYCHE!”, which became a first step towards exorcizing the agony. In the same way that Meek Mill’s “Dreams and Nightmares” intro serves as an adrenaline shot to help shake off self-doubt and depression, the songs on …Is Committed are meant to be played at pulverizing volume. These are sing-a-longs for listeners to shred their larynxes. Raw power tapping into atavistic rage, and offering catharsis for anyone who has ever felt like the world was conspiring against them.

..Is Committed represents both a return to form and a mid-career left turn. Bemis still traffics in exaggeration and Jewish humor, but the hyperbole has been tempered by the blows of reality. This is no longer the angst of post-adolescence, but the grim phantasms of adulthood. Coming full circle in a sense, Bemis says these are the most autobiographical songs that he’s written since high school.

As with any Say Anything record, the songs are rollicking and self-referential, jam packed with meta-references and in-jokes. Before “lore” became a Gen Z cliché, Bemis was employing it when it was still called “world-building.” The opener “BE, CHILDREN (INTRODUCTION TO THE REUNION RECORD)” starts off with what might as well be a mission statement: “to the self-indulgent/indulge yourself with me.” It’s partially a satire of a reunion song, but filled with a jarring and uncomfortable honesty that belies the tongue-in-cheek humor. It also rocks hard. Bemis did not bring Say Anything back to make an Iron & Wine record.

Take “ON CUM,” a textbook second song ripper packed with allusions to the bands that formed the soundtrack to Emo Nite and the When We Were Young Festival. It has a chopping punk thrash backbeat, a battering NOFX-style second verse attack, and an idiosyncratic and emotional outro.

No one is better than Bemis at leaning into the cliches and subversively deconstructing them. With “AUTO-HARMONIC ASS FIXATION,” he riffs on perverse tropes of sex and masturbation, but manages to write a sincere and liberatory ode to the joys of carnality. On “I, VIBRATOR,” he lampoons the traditional “for the ladies” song by writing about his desire to be a disembodied vibrator used as a tool of female sexual empowerment.

There are songs about needing to get the band back together (“DAISY’S”) and songs about religious oppression (“SAY ANYTHING, COLLECTIVELY, MADE LOVE TO YOUR GOD”) and 8-minute, five-part odysseys that mock the expectations of a final song (“FAN FICTION”). But the nuclear reactor core of the album comes when Bemis unpacks the layers of trauma and writes fearlessly about the vicissitudes of the last several years.

On “WE SAY GRACE IN THIS GODDAMN BAND, MISTER,” Bemis attacks with grace and venom, aiming acerbic barbs at the small-town in Texas that nearly destroyed him. The façade of kindness that dissolved when its fundamentalist Christian, anti-civil rights philosophy was directed towards his family. “CARRIE & LOWELL & CODY (PENDENT)” finds the author getting into conflict with his mother for the first time. It’s a song about codependency, alienation, and resolving conflict with the ones closest to you.

The penultimate “WOMAN SONG” might be the most important song that Bemis has ever written. It was penned a few days after child services came to his home. He’d been up all night, sleepless, in tears. In front of his sleeping daughter, he improvised this requiem for his estranged mother and his vanished youth. A rumination about the devils that had been expunged but had returned with vengeance. It’s frail and vulnerable and ridiculous and funny, distilling all the heart-on-sleeve pathos and self-parody that define the Say Anything canon.

…Is Committed is as much an album as a labyrinth, a therapy session kvetch, a conflagration of obscene horror, familial distress, and humanistic lament. A defining capstone to a period of blinding trauma that has only now begun to heal. You probably already knew that anesthetized bliss was never in the cards. After all, the closest thing to a happy ending in real life is one that is bittersweet.

I've heard the album. Or as much as I could as I skipped through it. It's very bad.

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