by Chris Coplan (@CCoplan)
If you’ve ever read my work, there's a few central questions that I scratch at endlessly. Chief among them are genres: bands often shirk away, but these "tags" help fans and even critics in understanding the creative and cultural framework that informs something as seemingly nebulous but massively important as your average LP. What is most interesting when it comes to genres is how they’re best used. It’s always curious how artists engage them in spite of those apprehensions. The way the best bands lean into and away from these "trappings" to make something great and also to comment on the nature of categorizing art. If you want a good example of what I'm endlessly and obsessively talking about, you need only listen to Objections.
The UK based post-punk trio has generated heaps of buzz and praise around their eagerly awaited debut, the ten track Optimistic Sizing. Part of that, if we're to believe the record's press release, is how the band engage genre. Specifically, that they free themselves from the "constraints" of their "Minutemen music-as-socialism blueprint" by each member overseeing "their own chunk of sonic landscape" to create soundscapes that are "vast, limitless, and ready to be explored."
The LP readily demonstrates that Objections have a decidedly solid baseline when it comes to post-punk. Openers "Idiot Fill" and "BSA Day" encapsulate this vaguely janky, oddly rhythmic approach that feels in line with the recent fare from countrymen like Dry Cleaning and Black Midi. There's edge and heft to these selections, but they're more inclined to feel like a sampler platter or teaser for what's to come (whether intended or not).
Then, you factor in the band's core subject matter — which includes "performative royal mourning, ill-suited sexual relationships, coastal gentrification, and motormouth bigots" — and Objections are dedicated enough students of the "game" to lean into both the heavy roots and the more recent, free-flowing experimental tendencies to make something appropriately weird, gritty, fun, and open-ended.
Those tracks are most interesting when you can feel a detour brewing. Even a later cut ("Space News") fully works because the way fuzz and noise encroaches on their pristine punk bass, and you get the sense that the lines of reality may crack (even if they don't quite then and there). Once the band can muster the added dash of skill and/or courage to smash these barriers, big things indeed happen. The most important of which may be "Excuses" — it's space-funk meets psych-jazz near some distant black hole, and as it slowly cools and coalesces into post-punk fury, you can practically feel something change in your brain.
Though markedly less dramatic in its intentions, "Hymns" flirts with the same kind of energies and ideas, which augment a fairly "standard" rock jam into something altogether more effective. "TJOMT" almost takes it into the opposite direction; the "battle" between sounds big and verbose, small and contemplative is an interesting experiment and a demonstration of the band's shared skills and wholly intriguing level of interplay.
These aforementioned tracks go beyond "Objections are making super-duper weird post-punk." Yes, that's absolutely what they've done — Optimistic Sizing works because it grabs and pulls at the genre with a passion and lightheartedness that wrings out every bit of potential from these ideas/structures. Mostly, though, Objections are commenting on the nature of genres by showing us what they really and truly mean.
Heaps of bands have tried to demolish post-punk before, and Objections aren't exactly pioneers, but then they're not trying to be, and maybe they're more interested in the idea of uniqueness and individuality (which certainly fits with their three-headed dragon approach as mentioned earlier). The press release for the LP goes on to describe it as Objections’ "musical language with which to communicate their own unique worldview." It's not about concocting the next mutant in post-punk's evolution, but what the shape, intent, and energies of their own hybrid means.
Tracks like "Excuses" and "Hymns" demonstrate that the band have really novel ideas about making new and interesting music. Those stand out because they capture something essential about the band and how they seek to redefine post-punk for their own means and end goals. If you look at other tracks, even ones that don't excel as "effectively," you see a bigger picture. "Small Change" is solid enough, but that sense of momentum and collision of ideas doesn't ring nearly as true. "Nicely Done" sees the band's novel approach to generating conflict and interest (they're the same, right?) land without its total heft.
It's less that they're good tracks over bad tracks (they're all genuinely great), but rather that it's the shape of this record that matters. It's gas, paint, and blood thrown across a giant canvas, and Objections don't care if it's novel, just that it's unwaveringly their own. That this record does seem exciting enough to make us consider certain tropes and attributes is secondary; it is of their exact specifications (chaotic and orderly all at once), and we can see who they are in the record's various loops, curls, and fractured ends. The impact doesn't matter when it feels so perfectly like your own weird and wonderful lil' machine.
Most bands try to do this with their respective records, but with Objections their self-awareness and emphasis on individuality makes that process all the more interesting as much as it is wholly uneven. Optimistic Sizing tells us that genres are a construction — specifically, a door frame out of The Chronicles of Narnia. It's not a magical world we enter, but this dimension of pure sound and idea. With this record, Objections have tried to capture how they see this beguiling space, and in doing so, they both affirm the value of genres, dismiss them outright, and cement this idea that genres are never static but something that evolves and grows with bands willing to break new ground (and honor that which is already there).
They’ve made a rather perfect specimen of post-punk in that's what it precisely sounds like. Yet it's perpetually bored and also exploding with excitement, a snapshot of how the genre’s been a pioneering force in rock for decades. It's often hard to truly discern the shape of post-punk, but with Objections, that uncertainty and disorder have never felt more exciting and compelling.