wound / wound wind / wind

Chasing Hamburg: Part 2

Before moving to Rochester I’d never felt like I’ve felt recently.

For four cold months every year this city becomes a painted, bitter tomb; when the season sees fit to rebirth all of us, it does so with rain. Defeats reign heavy year round and almost everyone I know has mentioned, in one way or another, putting effort into making sure they don’t hole themselves up against the bite of white streets and flecked air that can seal up your throat. When the mercury contracts enough the moisture inside your lungs can freeze. Try to breathe in that. 

Before moving to Rochester I’d heard a million comparisons used to describe this band. All name dropping. Whatever ‘classic’ punk or hardcore bands people wanted to toss into their conversation. I was guilty myself, but I didn’t know much better. For most of 2006 I was eighteen. Most of these comparisons were, and probably still are, based on criteria that shouldn’t even factor into discussion.

When I prematurely described this album to a friend I said it sounded like What a veteran band would have done if they took a crack at this band’s demo. I feel like I understand this as a work a little more now though. What’s happening here is that on this record Polar Bear Club are more themselves than ever. This is it. As a group of guys who’ve on average swapped members once per-release, they somehow get more and more cohesive with each attempt. Most of the complaints I ever heard about Chasing Hamburg were due to the fact that it was a collection of loose ideas, and after hearing CBGP it (CH) seems like part of a logical progression;* here we have a David Comes to Life to parallel CH’s ChemCom. Every new piece this band offers up makes the previous ones feel like they’re building to a grander whole. A direction is forming.

I would still like this record if I did not live where I live now, but getting back to what I was saying at the start, this city seems to breed a very specific kind of Down. It feels like these songs. Like things that are bad - decaying houses with people living in them, young trees that are already wilting in public places, reading about a murder happening down the street from your house in a newspaper, a silhouette of innocence - but these things are only really bad if you’ve gotten accustomed to living well enough to be depressed on some level that is not neurochemical. (It could always be worse, right? Like I said, this is a very specific, and complex Down.)

I don’t want to go off dissecting singular pieces of this album or individual contributions to those compositions, because I feel like that betrays the point I’m trying to get at. There are tour songs, there are personal songs, there are ‘anthems,’ and there are songs that sound like they’re about as pointed as you can be without using full names. What is really important is the overarching synthesis.

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*Though to be fair, I liked Chasing Hamburg. So I suppose I should say a more logical progression.