The GB Album Club 016 - The Greatest Generation by The Wonder Years

Duders! Welcome to the 16th edition of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! Last week, an angel who was cast out of heaven attempted to claim our soul because of a bet he made with god and there was a lot of metal and anguish and it was a whole thing. This week, the burden that attempts to claim us is not the quest for contentedness, but the past, as our album this time is The Greatest Generation by The Wonder Years! This album was selected by @climax, and you can listen below:

Spotify

Apple Music

Bandcamp

Youtube

Here at the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club, we threw a bunch of albums into a sheet, and every week, we pick an album at random to listen to and discuss. To participate, all you gotta do is listen to the album and comment below! But if you want to talk more music shit or just hang out, come to our Discord! This cycle's coming to an end soon, and if you want to contribute to the next one, that's where you gotta be! Also it's a chill ass Discord, so we're not going to light up your phone or computer with notifications all the time or consume your life. At least most of the time. So come on down!

This album was very nearly my favorite of 2013 (losing to Queens of the Stone Age’s …Like Clockwork alone). I was just listening to a bunch of The Wonder Years last week, and I still have no idea why they didn’t get bigger. Almost like they made this album a decade too early or something.

Anyway, the first 7 tracks are nonstop killers, the last 2 tracks are arguably their most impressive work, and the rest of the songs have good moments. Except “Madelyn”… that one is an insta-skip for me.

I was in high school during the height of the 2000s emo* wave, or whatever you want to call the wave of bands that you saw on the When We Were Young festival poster. I, along with a large portion of my peers, spent a lot of time being way too vocal about hating those bands.

Was all that bile justified? In hindsight, probably not. On one hand, many of the bands were terrible enough to deserve all that loathing and more, and on top of that, the aesthetic was frequently ugly and the sound frequently homogenous. On the other hand, the same is true for many music scenes in the 2000s, on top of the very 2000s impulse to rage against anything that didn't display a certain kind of masculinity or was marketed to a female audience. (The 2000s were bad!)

Personally, I didn't like how solipsistic the emo movement seemed to me. It was the George W. Bush years. We were at war and the failure of just about every institution was becoming more and more apparent by the day. Your response, emo movement, is to what? Dye your hair and get some snakebites? Of course, this was an extremely dismissive and reductive way of thinking, and a large part of this attitude came from the fact that I was listening to a lot of political hip hop and stuff like that. But it was the default attitude I had about anything "emo" at the time, even if I didn't know how to express that yet.

All of which is to say that I wish this album came out like 8 years earlier. That way, maybe, I could've found it then and let go of some of that emo hate.

To be clear, this album would not have made me like emo-y music. I actually found this album kind of stale and sonically one note. But I like that it's introspective without being indulgent. It's an album about how you are who you are because of the environment formed by those who came before you and not only how you deal with that, but the realization that the older generations dealt with the exact same shit. Poverty and urban decay and the stuff your grandfather told you when you were becoming "a man."

Again, the album wasn't for me, and this whole opinion is based on a perception of emo that fundamentally isn't true. But it's what stood out to me. Sometimes a little nuance is nice.

FAVORITE SONGS: "Passing Through a Screen Door," "Dismantling Summer," "The Devil in My Bloodstream"

*I realize some might object to the labeling of this album as "emo." However, if you sing with that inflection where you lean into the vowels like that, you're emo. I don't make the rules.

I listened to this last night and it made very little impression on me. I didn't get into emo much as a kid so this just kinda sounded like a by the numbers effort. Fine but fairly forgettable.

As someone who generally likes emo music, I enjoyed this album and I'm amazed I haven't heard more of The Wonder Years. I liked the album, but it's kinda hard to call out anything that made The Greatest Generation stand out from other albums in the genre that came out around the same time. There's nothing wrong with being a bog standard emo/pop punk album though. It's nice to hear a band that evokes my childhood, yet wasn't actually a band I'd heard before.

I'm also a tentative emo fan, and I agree with the notion that this album didn't really add anything to the genre. The timing of it seems particularly strange as well. Almost Here by The Acadamy Is... came out in 2008, which was in turn a response to albums like A Beautiful Lie from 30 Seconds to Mars (2005) and Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge by MCR (2004). The Greatest Generation was released a full five years after The Acadamy Is..., but feels like it should have been released alongside it. I feel like Emo was nothing more than a punchline at this point. All that said, this isn't a bad album. It is totally palatable emo/pop-punk/whatever else you want to classify it as. It just didn't have anything that really made it stand out to me.