"I Wish That I Knew What I Know Now..."

We've all got at least one of those albums from childhood, some random little piece of music miscellenia that found it's way into your adolescent experience and stuck around for a couple of good years, and hundreds of spins around the CD player. You may not listen to them nowadays, except during fits of nostalgia or (at worst) for shits and giggles, but if pressed you'll be able to name all the songs and recite a surprising amount of the lyrics.

Some you'll never admit to ever having listened to in polite company, or even among your closest friends and family. Others you will just never understand how your teenage brain could assign such profound meaning to something so unremarkable. And then there are those that, given the chance, will surprise you. This is a story about an album that falls into the third category.

It was... I want to say junior high? My best friend had moved 45 mintues away a couple of years before, so time spent at his house was usually a multi-day event spent cooped up in his room playing video games, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 with his parents (they were cool like that), and playing Magic: The Gathering (yes, I was one of those kids). And listening to music. Lots of music. And he always had some new album by some band I had never heard of, which was always an exciting event. One of those was Everclear's "So Much For The Afterglow."

Not exactly "Highway 61 Revisited," but there was something about that album. It was just grungy enough, in music and lyrics, to make it past my "cool-o-meter" (it was the 90s, lets remember), but different enough from Nirvana and Soundgarden and all the bands that made careers ripping them off to seem exotic. Whereas most grunge and alternative bands of the day sang lyrics that were oblique metaphors at best, goofy nonsense at worst, Everclear was the exact opposite; if anything, their lyrics were TOO literal. And while almost all the songs on the album were at least somewhat related to the Nirvana-formula of power-pop songs played like punk songs, they also had out-of-genre touches that made it stand out and seem exciting, from the Beach Boys parody at the beginning of the title track to the synthesizer blips of "Everything to Everyone" to the cowbell and horns of "One Hit Wonder." Needless to say, it didn't take long for me to pick up a copy of my own. And we soon became the best of friends.

Fast-forward to over a decade later, and as I'm burning CDs onto a new computer I come across a burned disk labelled "So Much For The Afterglow" (I had sold the original copy years before), and I found I just couldn't stop myself from listening to it. And on listening to it, I discovered an album much different from the one that I loved as a 13 year old, one that I could only truly appreciate now that I was past 20 years old and had experiences that were completely alien to the teenage frame of reference. Not a perfect album. Almost certainly not a "great" album. But a good album, and a surprising one.

Like any good post-"Nevermind" 90s alternative album, "Afterglow" is plenty dark. But it's dark in a way that's different from all the rest. Whereas most followed the Kurt Cobain model of lyrics, highly metaphorical and abstract words usually about generic emotional experiences rather than specific events, Everclear was all about the specifics, sometimes the almost painfully exact specifics : it's hard to imagine another band of the time that would open a song with the line, "Here is the money that I owe you/so that you can pay the bills/I will give you more when I get paid again," or about how they will "buy you that big house/way up in the West Hills." And unlike most pop music, especially the ones that were inspired by the smell of teen spirit, the songs are not about teenagers or youthful experience. It's about the shame and pain and embarrassment that adults experience from living adult lives, from the pain of failing as a husband or a parent, to looking back at their own childhoods and realizing how it's affecting them now (usually negatively). The pain that the album speaks to isn't so much the fury of raging against the world, but the sighs of those who realized long ago that the world will always win.

This is both it's biggest charm and it's biggest flaw. The almost complete lack of metaphor in the lyrics creates a definite clarity of meaning which can be even more stinging than all the other songs that dance around what they're trying to say:

"I think you like to be the simple toy/ I think you love to play the clown/I think you are blind to the fact that the hand you hold/is the hand that holds you down."

"She is perfect in that fucked up way/that all the magazine seem to want to glorify these days/she looks like a teenage anthem/like she could have been happy in another life."

"I hate those people who tell you/"money is the root of all that kills"/they have never been poor/they have never had the joy of a Welfare Christmas."

But on the other hand, the very-literal can often become the just-plain-too-literal, to the point that it's not so much poetry as a guy who is literally just complaining about how the prozac doesn't work any more, in those exact words. Some of the songs, like "Why I Don't Believe In God," a literal recounting of living with a mentally disturbed mother and the way it affects him even as an adult, are only saved by the absolute conviction in lead singer/songwriter Art Alexakis' voice and the fact that it leaves absolutely no doubt that he means it, god damn it, and with some of the shit he's talking about it's probably best not to question him on it.

"So Much For The Afterglow" is fascinating and frustrating all at the same time. Some of it's songs, like "I Will Buy You A New Life," "One Hit Wonder," and "Amphetamine" deserve much more recognition than they ever got. Others, like "Normal Like You" and "California King" probably just deserve to be forgotten. But still, none of it's flaws are stopping me from listening to it right now.