Pushing 23 is a real big bummer, but this record isn't one.
I picked up a book from a Little Free Library down the street from me last week – if you don't know what that is, it's what the title says. It's typically a wooden box with a door with windows attached to it on a post, and inside are used books. Their motto is "Take a book, leave a book." I brought a book back, and the one I took out was a book on finding joy, written by Charlotte Davis Kasl. A few pages in, the author compared joy to poetry. She said "Joy is like genuine poetry. It communicates to us in the whole of our being and seems beyond words. Have you ever had a wonderful experience and felt it go clunk inside when you tried to explain it to someone? That's because the words could not capture the essence of the experience…" That's how I feel about cleopatrick's BUMMER.
BUMMER is the chain-link fence between cleopatrick's older music and their music & themselves as they are now. It's like the sad, nostalgic feelings that I & the kids I went to school with felt when we heard last year that the old, big wooden playground in our town was being torn down because it "wasn't safe anymore." Glad for the memories, but we're grown up now, and so it's on to the next chapter. Life goes on and we all change, much like the playground had to change, and much like cleopatrick's music has evolved from their previous releases. BUMMER is the next chapter for cleopatrick and all of their listeners. It's such a good record. Just how joy is like poetry, so is BUMMER, and it's good poetry. Poetry demands itself to be felt, rather than over-explained, as with any other art form....so I can't explain to the fullest how this record makes me feel, but know that I love it with my entire heart. To break down how each of the tracks make me feel (beyond the singles I've already written about across this cyberspace), would be like cracking open my journal and uploading pages from it directly onto the internet with no censoring, no editing. It would be embarrassing & would leave my heart utterly exposed. Breaking down lyrics is what I can do the best, but to do that with BUMMER it doesn't entirely feel right to me, so I won't do it. A track-by-track review wouldn't work for BUMMER anyway – I believe that you need to sit by yourself and give the record a few spins, really soak it in by yourself, then share it with a close friend or two. Take it as the whole piece of work which it is and not bit by bit. It's not an instant-gratification record, not formulaic, not expectant, it's a record with real depth & passion.
BUMMER is brilliant. My favorite tracks are "2008," "Why July," and "No Sweat." There's a couple lines from "No Sweat" that make me want to lay down my pen forever – "i died on cross and never saw my god / i said 'i'm tryna stay gold but it's getting hard." And there's so many more lines & bits I really love throughout the record such as "my kubrick stare in the backseat," "scored in wilhelm scream," "if you ever really cared at all / say so / cuz i'm sick of being on my own / if you need me won't you let me know," and more.
BUMMER isn't like anything else out there on the charts and that's the beauty of it. It's unique and original. Some of the tracks are heavy, not easily swallowed, not a typical Top 40 Rock radio hit, but that's what makes it so good & special. BUMMER is the record we're going to go back to over and over again, it both defining an era in our young lives & shaping us as people. It's a must-listen. It's honest, vulnerable, and just genuinely really great rock music.
cleopatrick will be on tour this fall with Ready the Prince & ZIG MENTALITY on the American & Canadian dates, and in the UK with Sick Joy & ZIG MENTALITY. You can find tickets here.
You can purchase a copy of BUMMER on cd & vinyl, and buy other BUMMER related merch here.
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