Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
I’ll be the first to say I’m not the biggest Modern Baseball fan. I could do without both their debut album Sports and Holy Ghost, their third and final project. In fact, that feeling of mine can be expanded across all bands of similar ilk— Midwest emo, emo revival, folk punk, whatever you want to call it— for a couple reasons. One is that the sound and atmospheres fostered by emo revival grates on me: the vocal fry, the contrived lo-fi sound, the over-enunciated hybrid of talking and singing, the immature lyrics overflowing with artificial pity and an unquenchable lust for martyrdom. The other is that I grew up during the tail end of the first emo era and my neighborhood bullies were pre-teens with studded belts and the most tattered Chuck Taylors I’d ever seen. The underdeveloped teenage angst inherently tied to emo has never nurtured anything in my soul, especially since I discovered a lot of this music after the fact, once I went off to college and grew into an adult.
So, why am I such a big fan of You’re Gonna Miss It All? It’s one of my favorite albums ever, so I explored within myself to find out why.
Squeezed right in between their first and final albums, You’re Gonna Miss It All was released with fanfare only in the Philadelphia local circuit and Midwest emo scenes in February 2014. With a tight runtime that clocks in at just under 30 minutes, years went by before it became known as a cult classic of its era.
It just clicked with me in a way that others didn’t. It’s not a “lightning in a bottle situation”; in the years since Modern Baseball’s dissolution, I’ve become a big fan of Slaughter Beach, Dog, a successor project of Jake Ewald, who was one of the two driving creative forces of MoBo. Both Slaughter Beach, Dog and Modern Baseball’s second album captured the nostalgia of a microgeneration that came of age and went off to college in the mid-2010s in a way that few other artists have in this medium. Modern Baseball was onto something specific here that they didn’t have before and couldn’t recapture after. Whether it’s because of an inability to point to what made it great or inter-band dynamics that caused their eventual breakup, we’ll never know, but because of the places Ewald has gone since, I believe it’s the latter.
Characterized by the aforementioned angst and the musings of an underdeveloped frontal lobe, You’re Gonna Miss it All lets a few rays of ambition and desire seep into the hopelessness. For as much angst that exists on this album (like “I’m alright, I’m okay / I won’t need your help anyway” on the album’s opening song “Fine, Great”), there are saccharine themes of young love and juvenile drunkenness in midsize city basements in equal measure. You can feel your heart pound as Ewald describes an intoxicatingly desolate walk home after a night with a new crush (“I walk home with my eyes low dreaming of conversations we’ll have tomorrow”) or musty basement lights flickering above half-empty kegs and a dozen twenty-somethings (“I saw you from the bottom of the staircase / stood out for hours as you complained / about how you haven’t seen your friends yet / that you’re too drunk to stand / and you not knowing / if you could love him forever”). For past generations, a drive in the station wagon out to Lover’s Lane or midnight swim in the reservoir might be the stamp of love, but for us, it’s laying in a messy bedroom with the blinds drawn, skipping class, watching Planet Earth and brainstorming tattoos.
In several ways, You’re Gonna Miss It All feels like a moment in time. The band was maturing in both their writing and sound, beyond the rudimentary stages of their buzz but not yet over polished and disillusioned by the world. Sports is a stripped-down album that feels too young to be relatable; the pieces were there, but it wasn’t the full MoBo sound yet (only Ewald and Lukens played on it). It’s not nearly big enough for a band whose ethos begs you to turn the volume all the way up. Holy Ghost, the follow-up to their magnum opus, suffered from a sound that felt too polished by emo revival standard, and the melancholic overtures were too dissonant from its sound, harkening to stark images of desolate wastelands. This isn’t to say growth is bad— as we mature, we become more serious, more disillusioned— but it doesn’t match the quick-hitting youthful angst of the music. Ewald went on to make very self-serious art with Slaughter Beach, Dog, but it felt more self-aware, stylistically contained in a subgenre which suited the place he was in life a little bit better. But at the time of Holy Ghost, Bren Lukens was struggling with their identity and the weight of expectations. Later on, it came out that they even once attempted suicide. In retrospect, Holy Ghost felt like a natural progression as the members of Modern Baseball became true adults and began to deal with real-life problems, but some of the magic of youth was lost to time.
On You’re Gonna Miss it All, though, the whole band was recently back from college and firing on all cylinders. Ian Farmer, who produced and engineered Sports, shifted into a bass-playing role and left the post-production duties to those better equipped. Will Yip mastered the album— a legend in the scene— and the engineering was done by Jonathan Low, who is known for his work with The National. The big band plus the titans of post-production in the room blanketed the sad youthful dreamers in a massive sound; they played with more raw power and pure energy than before or since, and it shone through on wax. The juxtaposition of the bigness and its frantic drums and clean guitars with the quaint and infinitesimal problems of small-town east coast kids coming of age in a mid-tier American city create a sensory dreamscape for the listener, one where we can remember the trials and tribulations of maturation in the golden haze of secret hideaways in cities yet undisturbed by the endless churn of inflation and gentrification. It’s often said that we don’t realize we’re in the good times until they’re gone, but on You’re Gonna Miss It All, the members of Modern Baseball seem keenly aware that they’re in the waning years of the halcyon days.
You’re Gonna Miss It All also feels like a primer to Slaughter Beach, Dog’s style, even if we didn’t know it at the time. The tenor of the album is gentle and buoyant—if not a bit naive—and it seems to balance out the patented boyish gloom. There’s a tenderness in Ewald’s voice, who sings lead vocals on over half the album, that Bren Lukens’ brashness couldn’t accomplish. There’s a sardonic sentimentality in his cadence that fondly remembers the past but fears the future (take “a brick boot swimming lesson in the deep end of my adolescence,” or “caught in between my adolescent safety net and where the world wants me to be”). The reminiscences take center stage in the mind of Ewald with an almost Proustian tilt that builds a monument to slice-of-life memories. Even for Lukens, the fear of the future is only tangential (although it would take center stage on later Modern Baseball songs), and he laments the social focus on what lies ahead, like in the album’s opening bar, when he snarls, “I hate worrying about the future / because all my current problems are based around the past.”
Cherish an album like You’re Gonna Miss It All, because it only comes around once in a generation, a brief epic with a big sound and searing instrumentation that reflects upon a short life lived with awe-inspiring vulnerability. The true pull of this album is its earnestness, a pointedly vulnerable coming-of-age tale that’s beautiful because of how embarrassing it is, not despite it. The only album from the era that rivals it in that category is Lorde’s Pure Heroine—like we’re reading the diaries of a visionary before they’ve grown up.
This album holds a special place in my heart but I don’t think I lament the death of Modern Baseball as much as some of its bigger fans. It might be because this is the only one of their albums I come back to. It might also be because I discovered them after their disbandment (my first listen came while I was in college, somewhere around 2018, which could’ve also contributed to its resonance for me). Besides, we’re lucky to have gotten anything out of these guys at the time anyway. We watched Modern Baseball grow up before our eyes, in the limelight, before an unsympathetic public. They let us into their world, and though it was much like millions of other kids’ upbringing across the country, it’s that exact lack of uniqueness and their ability to properly romanticize it that made them beacons of their generation. Emo music (or emo revival) is a fleeting thing, anyway, not built to stand the test of time. It’s an art form that owes its entire ethos to youth and angst, better suited for quirky, down-on-their-luck romantics and dreamers, not those bludgeoned by the trials of life and endless toil. Once the dreams die, so does emo revival. This was never supposed to be a forever thing.
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Jameson Draper | @jamdraper
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