B&C's 2016 Albums of the Year AKA End of Times Soundtrack
This is the issue for me about these claims that he's a great lyricist. Such topics as tackled by someone like Morrissey would have endless quotable lines, but there is no such thing on Teens of Denial IMO, partially because of the production that buries his enunciation and partially because self-help poetry isn't necessarily effective lyricism. I mean, what the hell is Drunk Drivers really about beyond the surface level?
I mean, you've got Niels saying just a few posts ago how funny and memorable the lyrics are, so it's obviously subjective. I'd put Will Toledo up there with the most quotable lyricists in rock right now, he reminds me a lot of David Berman of Silver Jews and his ability to take really depressing songs about existential terror and ennui and bring them to life with half a dozen standout lines.
Drunk Drivers is, like much of the album, a song about leaving a party full of people you don't like doing things you don't approve of purely because you don't want to be alone anymore and slowly finding yourself no longer resembling the person you want to be:
"It's too late to articulate it
That empty feeling
You share the same fate as the people you hate
You build yourself up against others' feelings
And it left you feeling empty as a car coasting downhill
I have become such a negative person
It was all just an act
It was all so easily stripped away
But if we learn how to live like this
Maybe we can learn how to start again
Like a child who's never done wrong
Who hasn't taken that first step"
And maybe that stanza (which I rank as one of my favorites of the year) is an example of self-help writing, but I consider everything around it to be more descriptive than prescriptive, which makes all the difference.
