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I don’t really care for baseball, but I certainly love Modern Baseball. And I’m not all that interested in sports, but I sure carry around a lot of love for Modern Baseball’s first album, “Sports.”
“Holy Ghost” is the band’s third full-length album, proceeding “Sports” and their sophomore record, “You’re Gonna Miss It All.” The new album comes off the cuff of the EP, “MoBo Presents: The Perfect Cast,” as well as a short documentary called “Tripping in the Dark,” which reveals frontman Brendan Lukens recent struggles with substance abuse and lifetime struggles with depression and anxiety. In an interview with Vice, Lukens stated that Modern Baseball saved his life.
Like The Front Bottoms, I am drawn to this band because they tell of struggle so candidly, so unassumingly. They are also made up of people close to me in the age, so I may be biased, but I think there is some sort of paradoxical talent that goes into the ability to tell the truth both modestly and with charm.
Without any further ranting on my part about how much I love this band, I’ll let you decide for yourself whether you feel inspired and alive by Modern Baseball. Here’s a play by play of the record, where I’ll feature my favorite lyric in each song. Erm…play ball?
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| I promise I’ll stop now with the cheesy baseball references. I SWEAR. (source) |
1. Holy Ghost
Holy Ghost is the title track as well as the first track on the album. It serves as a short, introductory tune to the album, soft with a slow build, as other frontman Jake Ewald sings, “He's been haunting my dreams at night/I've been bleeding from tripping in the dark/Trying to turn on the light.” This track, in both sound and lyrics, reminds me of young but lingering fears or regrets. If they grow with you, if they grow bigger than you, they can become more than irrational. They can result in more serious states of being than just worry, like bleeding.
2. Wedding Singer
Holy Ghost flows right into the second track, Wedding Singer, a more peppy track that still speaks in its speed to anxiety. My favorite lyrics from this track happen to be the chorus: “Midnight rolls around/I thought you heard me sing your spirit sound/But you turned in early/Left the TV flickering/It staged romance across your face.” The idea of shattered light in faded colors casting affection along someone’s skin is a breathtaking image to me. I wish I could say I liked the music video more; while it is somewhat symbolic in representing an anxiety disorder, to be honest it is a bit too manic pixie dream girl for my taste.
3. Note to Self
The third track, Note to Self, has some cool imagery in the first verse, but despite the fact, my favorite lines are “But I want to make something good/I want to make something better/Something that cannot leave the ground/Unless we lift it up together.” This song speaks to the frustration of having some idea what you want, but not knowing how to get there or how to create it yourself. The speaker desires permanence and companionship and individuality, but everything is imbalanced or in disarray despite his efforts to get where he wants to go.
4. Mass
Mass is a short and simple song, wrought with the defeat of missing someone and not being able to get to them. My favorite lyrics, though they aren’t particularly complex, are as follows: “Days like this I miss listening to records/Making coffee together/Snow globes and Jersey sheets.” I like the general statement of missing the mundane with a loved one, something everyone can relate to. I love that it’s followed by a few more specifics. I don’t know what snow globes or Jersey sheets necessarily mean to the speaker and his loved one, but that’s not for me to know. Though I might not get the reference, I understand why the speaker brings up details his loved one will find significant. Poems of address often do this.
5. Everyday
Everyday is a cocktail of bad memories and religious imagery. My favorite lines occur all the way through the last half of the song, “You need to hide/Its in your framework/Look me in the eyes and act like I don't know how shame works/Your compass spins in reverse/The trees do timelapse speed growth/The sky is lost behind a sea of green.” These lyrics remind me that time can move me, move trees, quickly, too quickly, and details can be lost within time, but that doesn’t mean everything painful will fade. The song continues: “She's acting like she knows what's up/She's trip, tripping that devotion stuff/Breaking like her bread won't puff/She's sipping, sipping from that holy cup/Waking up everyday is all about/Doing things you don't want to do/But your rewarded/You get to wake up.” The speaker here talks flippantly about Holy Communion, but then flips a switch to comment on the sanctity of life. A strange combination to both question the meaning of living but also reinforce that even if the meaning is unknown, or racked with agonizing memories, it is not something to throw away.
6. Hiding
My favorite song by far on this entire album is no. 6, Hiding. There is something that lures like forgiveness on the receiving end of this song, and something like an apology coming from the speaker. “The lever pulled and all at once/The floor was false/The center seam divided/Lace and well-pressed cotton/Found the flood we’d since forgotten/We still leave our shoes at the door/Before we wring out our wet clothes/Across your floor and future/Stitch the gaps that destiny assumed/With floral sutures/Are you hiding or have I abandoned you?/Let me learn here/I am in pursuit of all I can undo.”
7. Coding to These Lukens
Track number 7, Coding to These Lukens, is a call and response between Ewald and Lukens, presumably regarding the fact that Lukens was/is not okay, and his friends are trying to help him out. I enjoy the raw end of this song, the denial and defeat, as Lukens sings, “I know it can't be in my head/It must be one of you who keep pulling me aside/To chit chat about me, who I am, what the deal is with/Who I was once.”
8. Breathing in Stereo
Breathing in Stereo echoes Mass on its subject matter, but is more aggressive, seemingly written in desperation: “I can’t help thinking about you this whole ride home/From Alberta, Portland to wherever I’ll soon unfold/Into oblivion or somewhere between here and fact/Forever waiting for you/Ever-aching cause I’m/Longing for when I’ll be coming back to you.”
9. Apple Cider, I Don't Mind
For most of these songs, I’ve been picking longer stretches of lyrics, but Apple Cider, I Don’t Mind contains my favorite two liner on the album, and possibly in a song altogether: “Did you ever love me?/Biopsy from the origin of sound.” What starts as a cliché question is followed by an unexpected, odd sentence the runs through my head a lot nowadays. If I pick myself apart, where am I speaking from?
10. What If...
What If… is a rumination on what it truly means to be a “good person.” It questions the existence of altruism, whether personal reputation has more of a stake in kindness than anything else. I picked these lyrics as my favorite because I like the way the sentences sound one after another: “When I was younger I thought of deep space/Pick me up swiftly, carry me away/Drop me off willing, light years long gone.” Nonchalance meets nostalgia. Weird.
11. Just Another Face
The closing track on the album is titled in reference to the first song Lukens ever wrote, called “How Do I Tell A Girl I Want to Kiss Her?”. But this song is not the conventional love song its title nods toward. It’s a song of self hatred and self love, of wanting to give up but simultaneously recognizing your own worth. Lukens reminds his listeners he’s standing with them: “If it's all the same, it's time to confront this face to face/I'll be with you the whole way/It'll take time, that's fact/I'm not just another face, I'm not just another name/Even if you can't see it now, we're proud of what's to come, and you.” As listener in my early twenties, I find this song comforting. Constantly trying to “get your life together?” Guess what, it’ll never happen. But you’re not finding your way; you’re on your way. You’ve been there and here the whole time and never alone.
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