Jeff Rosenstock's 'WORRY': "I've had a bad year"

As I’ve been slowly trawling my way through the mountain of media that I will eventually demolish, I’ve been exploring Spotify in the gaps. Plenty of albums have been recommended to me that I haven’t had the time to listen to properly, or to even give a decent shot. So a few months ago, when I had the chance, I put Jeff Rosenstock’s WORRY on in the background while I started writing a new project. It was on my third listen-through that it really hit me. WORRY is a superb album.

WORRY only really ended up on my radar because of James Acaster - an incredible British comedian. Acaster is very passionate about the album; his music podcast and his book about his mental breakdown/album collection (it’s great) are both titled after the last song on the tracklist. It was WORRY that fuelled his claim that 2016 was the best year for music. Ever. A bold claim for sure, and one that I felt compelled to investigate. I was expecting to like a few songs from WORRY, but to conclude that Acaster had been hyperbolic about his praise for Rosenstock. 

It is the second solo album by the artist, and the first that was produced by a much bigger record label which inspired him to try to create more rebellious music to share with a wider audience - or as he would put it, “I wanted these lyrics to be punk as fuck”. The political messages in the songs couldn’t be any clearer and the angsty hatred for ‘the man’ fuels an album that moves through different styles of punk fluidly. The first track, We Begged 2 Explode, sets the tone: a melancholy song that starts with only Rosenstock’s vocals and an understated piano accompaniment. The song is about the inevitability of growing up and moving on. It features some very powerful lyrics; “As we’re bouncing up and down, trying to make the floor break/Stop sneering at our joy, like it’s a careless mistake”. But the album really shows its hand when a wailing guitar, a chorus of voices and some very angry drums explode onto the track with a powerful presence that brings every song a pounding rhythm that feels angry and heavy. 

The other tracks are all astounding; Pash Rash compliments the first song by opening with a lament about how long Rosenstock has been drinking and singing before bursting into a love song, but not without a slight dig at technology with his claim that he wants to “See your face again, not borne on beams from outer space through AMOLED displays”. This is the beginning of the more gritty realism coming through in the music. The 3rd track is Festival Song, which takes aim at corporate immorality and technology’s status as an overlord over our generation; “Take a long look at the billboards that smother the air till you can’t ignore them, and glamorise department store crust-punk-chic”. It also critiques the punk movement that WORRY seems to exist within, much like some of Rosenstock’s earlier work with the band Bomb The Music Industry! (that I couldn’t help but delve into after WORRY) - how can you be antiestablishment if you buy “sweatshop denim jackets” and fall for easy entertainment.

I could go on, describing every track and how incredible and layered each is. Instead, I’ll point out a few particular songs that break from the mould a little. Track 11, Rainbow, is just so clearly influenced by ska, albeit a punky and crunchy take on the genre. Rosenstock’s harsh vocals scream “We ain't got no money, you got me!” in one of the most iconic portions of the album and then the warped guitar transitions into Planet Luxury, a much heavier song that feels like some of the more noisy Nirvana songs, or perhaps even more like Rancid or Misfits. It’s aggressive, with the discordant-sounding guitar pushing the whole track forward and into the last section of the album; an Abbey Road-sounding ‘medley’, where the songs carry on from each other. This last passionate chunk starts with HELLLLHOOOOLE, an angry and almost anarchistic song - “They would pluck us from the lives we’re living, with no fucks given, and profit from the pain, forcing you and I to feel like children, cause if they didn’t we wouldn’t be too scared to say that we don’t want to live inside a hellhole”. The medley concludes with Perfect Sound Whatever (just like that James Acaster book!), and a statement that nothing can be perfect, so we make do with what we can do and what we have. 

WORRY is a powerful statement of hatred for the powerful and for the apathetic world that we live in. The album questions where it exists in its own culture, and screams against the unjust systems that surround us (the song To Be a Ghost includes mentions of “unarmed civilians executed publicly” and of being “born as a data mine for targeted marketing”). I wasn’t expecting to fall in love, but now I’ve exhausted Jeff Rosenstock’s catalogue of music and wish I could listen to WORRY for the first time all over again. If you haven’t heard the album before sit down with the volume cranked to eleven, get ready to feel things and just maybe you’ll end up worrying too.

Let me know what you think of WORRY if you give it a listen! Follow me on Twitter @pastadeficit and if you have any suggestions of things to review or write about just reach out!