it was hard to miss the reality that the band had the right sound and look to launch itself to the forefront of the imminent grunge revival that the music press (pitchfork and others) has been trying to start for close to five years now, with mixed success. a grunge revival is a hard thing to engineer. the process is rooted in a lot of irresolvable contradictions. i'm not sure that the people that study media have ever really properly understood how the contradictions in grunge collapse their model; they'd rather just try and explain what happened using their old models, and continue to hold to the delusion that it can be recreated using those methods, and then think they just have to tweak it better when it fails over and over.
this is why we have highly controlled bands like girls and yuck being put together in board rooms and marketed to us as nineties revivalism. because the 90s were put together in a board room! where speedy ortiz seemed to offer a little excitement was that they weren't put together in a boardroom. there was some realness there....
.....but, unfortunately, the record displays the clear influence of an army of carpark marketing people. it's a very professional, polished recording. it sticks almost perfectly to hatfield-era writing formulas, only pausing to bring in flourishes meant to appeal to 00s indie fans. as such, the perfectly safe writing sort of belongs in an engineering classroom more than it belongs in your headphones.
there are a few decent moments when the riffs reassert themselves, but, overall, it's formulaic to the point of being trite. true nineties revivalism will only come in the form of rejecting nineties revivalism.
3/5.
