Review: Merchandise - After The End
- Sep 9, 2014
- 2 min read
By Bailey Kretz, Staff Writer
[4AD; 2014]
Rating: 6/10
Key Tracks: “Enemy,” “Little Killer,” “Green Lady”
Merchandise has traded in dreamy lo-fi tracks for a more polished pop sound on this year’s After the End. Listening to Begging For Your Life, the band’s Record Store Day 12” release from earlier this year, you may assume that the Tampa, Fla. natives would continue down their path of hazy rock songs. On this new full length, however, Merchandise proves to be another shining example of how signing to 4AD means being shoved into a pop genre sooner or later.
Maybe this new polished sound is what Merchandise wanted all along. Lead singer Carson Cox certainly loves the attention of being onstage and for starting off as a punk artist, he can write some killer choruses. After the End serves as proof of that talent and is littered with catchy singles. Other than a few key tracks, however, the album falls flat.
One of those catchy singles, “Enemy,” shows a whole new side of the band. This song simply rules; if the band decided to change its sound and simply make songs exactly like this it would be perfectly fine. Clean guitars stand-in as makeshift sitars throughout the mega-catchy song. Any listener can tell Merchandise went into the studio and perfected this track by paying attention to every minute detail. “Little Killer,” another single, follows suit. The track is smooth and easily lodges itself in the listener’s head.
Merchandise’s downfall on this album is that with the exception of the singles, After The End is simply boring. The thing is, Cox is so good at writing catchy choruses that even shitty songs like “Telephone” are still somehow enjoyable to listen to. The bass line is just bad and the lyrics are incredibly cheesy. Yet somehow, the song gets you to the next chorus where Cox whines about a fucking telephone. And you keep listening.
When Merchandise gets it, Merchandise gets it so right. Everything you could ever want from the band is there. But then the group gets a little too cheesy and a little too ‘80s pop and it all falls apart. The album is a disappointment in Merchandise’s discography, but isn’t an inherently awful album. The disappointment comes from knowing what the band can do and watching it fail to reach that potential on After The End.
Listen to the album a couple of times and see what it has to offer. After that, just throw “Little Killer,” “Enemy,” and “Green Lady” into a separate playlist and call it a day.
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