Of Sound Mind | The Front Bottoms’ “In Sickness & In Flames”

Well-written songs can punch you right in the gut every single time you listen to them. They can anchor you to a place for the rest of your life, so that years later you hear the song again and remember exactly where you were and who you were with — or not with — when you first heard it.

I see two broad ways that songs can have such a formative impact. On one end of the spectrum is music where the lyrics are what connect, and the melody and harmony of the song mainly function as vessels. The other end is the opposite, where the instrumentation and emotion of the sound is what connects, and lyrics — if there are any — are nearly inconsequential.

Released Friday, The Front Bottoms’ new album, “In Sickness & In Flames,” attempts to sit at the center of this lyric-sonic spectrum, drawing on the lyrical specificity of folk-punk and the catchy songwriting of pop-punk. While the New Jersey band has succeeded in this genre-mixing realm in the past, the new album falls almost completely flat in its execution.

Over the course of the album, the vocals alternate between catchy choruses reminiscent of Blink-182 and nasal, almost-spoken-word verses. It’s almost always clear what the vocalist is saying, and in my book, the willingness to leave the lyrics raw and clear at the center of a song is refreshing and wonderful. Songwriters such as Bob Dylan have made their careers writing masterpieces where the centerpiece of the song is the story being told.

But The Front Bottoms’ new songs hold very little of the lyrical adeptness required. Most songs have forgettable lyrics where, even though you can hear every word sung, a story never quite forms. In “montgomery forever,” lead vocalist Brian Sella sings, “We used to live here, and now they’re blowing it up,” sucking emotion out of an ode to a lost place with the irreverent phrasing.

Many songs dawdle around themes of 20-something paranoia, vague mental illness and imperfect friendships, without the emotional throat punch those topics have the potential to deliver. Every once in a while, a line pops out that does deliver a kick, but it can feel almost accidental. In the last 15 seconds of “bus beat,” after singing, “I do it like that because that’s the way my baby likes it” a million times, the song ends with, “No matter how sad I am, I’m going to try to make you happy.” Woah.

As mentioned, poor lyric writing wouldn’t really matter if the music was fantastic. I couldn’t care less about what people are singing about — unless it’s absolutely terribly written — if the vocal melodies, instrumental harmonies and percussion come together to make a great sonic experience. While “In Sickness & In Flames” does a better job at pulling together solid songs, they end up being a collection of just that — solid.

I know a lot of people who had their “punk” phases, and this album reminds me of that time in my own life. Put on Blink-182 or Green Day, and many millennials and Gen Zers will have entire sections of their life come charging out of memory lane to steamroll them. The Front Bottoms’ new album seems to have the capacity to create the same experience today, sounding like a mix of these pop-punk bands with some orchestral instruments thrown in for good measure. But it doesn’t distinguish itself from its precursors enough — the musical aspects of “In Sickness & In Flames” sound like an artificial intelligence was fed mid-2000s pop-punk and taught to spit out chord progressions and guitar riffs in the same style.

I do want to pause for a moment, though, and ensure that I’m not looking back at my days of listening to pop-punk through rose-colored glasses. It’s entirely possible that The Front Bottoms are going to have as big an impact on others’ lives as Green Day has had on mine. The comment section of most of their songs on YouTube would seem to say they already have, and if there was ever a time for an album for anxious 20-year-olds, it’s now. But sometimes, looking back, it’s hard to disentangle life’s important events and the — possibly mediocre — songs we were listening to at the time. Keeping straight what is objectively good and what is personally meaningful is not only difficult, but probably impossible and ultimately useless.

Even so, my critical opinion is that “In Sickness & In Flames” is an album that could’ve been a meaningful lyrical journey or a catchy ride through an interesting genre, or lived up to both possibilities, but did not. I am harsher on media that is almost great, but falls short, than on media that is mediocre and self-aware. The album’s opener, “everyone blooms,” is the one song that does reach the potential that this band has. “everyone blooms” combines optimism about the different stages of life and advice for navigating it — “attitude and outlook, realize that it matters” — with a catchy, complex and briefly orchestral soundscape. After hearing what the album could’ve been, the journey downhill to the closing song is even more disappointing.

I encourage you to listen to the album and disagree with me wholeheartedly. Truly, I’d love to hear opposing opinions, but I’m going to give “In Sickness & In Flames” a weak 3/10.