by Sara Mae (@veryverynoisy)
After a ten year hiatus, the brothers Adam Parker and Ben Parker, along with Ben Fry are back with bigger stakes as My Best Unbeaten Brother (Nosferatu D2, Tempertwig, The Superman Revenge Squad Band). On their debut mini-album, Pessimistic Pizza, they meditate on, and rage about, recognizing their own agency. They insist on their capacity for action in a fucked-up world, and sometimes sing sometimes Will Moloney-style-talk to the listener, imploring for the opposite of indifference. It’s a refreshing plea in a world obsessed with irony and curated authenticity. On “Blues Fatigue” Ben Parker sings, “We’ll write a book about the times we’re living through and no there’s nothing that’s remarkable about the book. It’s about keeping in touch with the things that make us us.” So what makes the group themselves at this moment in their musical careers? As Ben Parker says, these are “Seven songs by three men from Croydon. Inspired by getting older, getting sadder, getting angrier with a post-Brexit world where The Smiths have been ruined by the actions of the ex-singer.”
“A Song About Double-Crossing a Friend” has an upbeat, almost boot-stomping kind of riff that opens up to a series of confessions and longing for having been honest from the beginning. “Close-Up Magic” feels like the group hits its stride in their storytelling, where so many of the songs think about big picture attitudes towards living, how they see the world, this song starts with a character named Johnny and breathlessly tells a story of a corporate worker. It doesn’t lack a sense of humor, “We’re NPCs that didn’t get fleshed out right” (NPCs of course, if you’re not a video game player, being non-player characters, the extras who don’t make their own decisions).
On the deeply earnest “It’s Not Embarrassing to Care About Stuff,” vocals layer together to declare, “If it’s embarrassing, we’re too old to care,” singing over chunky guitar riffs. On the lead single “Time on Our Hands, Spider-Man,” a dirty bass line sends us off to the races and we arrive at the very warm, easeful sentiment, “We have time on our hands, we can talk about it.” There is an urgency to take care of the people around us, rather than a navel-gazing angst.
The music has some of the frenetic aughts rock sound of the Strokes. Persistent and driving, it’s the kind of rock that makes your neck hurt the next day. They retain the gritty pops in the vocals over compressed guitar, often emphasizing the fire of the idiosyncratic words themselves over the sound. The bend in the opening lines of “Extraordinary Times,” which ends up being the spine for the song’s refrains, is both catchy and discordant, and reflects something of the emotional makeup of the song. A song, and really an album, about the things we tell ourselves to eschew responsibility, to feel better, how we might push ourselves to respond to the things happening in the world around us.