Music Review: Merchandise, After The End

By Less Lee Moore

O nostalgia is just a looking glass
It’s for us to distort and mold
Won’t someone please help me
I’m too young to feel this old.
—Merchandise, “Looking Glass Waltz”

The first track on Merchandise’s new album is called “Corridor,” a stunning instrumental track that feels like the introduction to a concept album. While After The End is anything but, it’s not a stretch to imagine the band tackling something like that one day. They’re full of surprises.

2012’s Children Of Desire (review) was a patchwork quilt of varying, and often-disparate, influences. While 2013’s Totale Nite seemed to push the band into shinier, almost new wave territory at times, the raw urgency of their core sound remained. With their latest, Merchandise continue to baffle and beguile.

Merchandise have often flirted with the sounds of the eighties, from post-punk to pop and many styles in between. Like its predecessors, After The End features a lot of keyboards, but for the first time the band has incorporated live drums into their sound. These, along with a harmonium, piano, jangling 12-string guitars, and Carson Cox’s grumbling baritone (and trembling falsetto), may prompt more comparisons to The Smiths than ever before.

Yet, as dark as the lyrics are, they’re nothing like Morrissey’s acerbic accusations. They’re suffused with bleak romanticism: think The Cure without all the self-conscious Goth trappings and you’re getting closer. Cox grapples with such weighty topics as freedom, nonconformity, hypocrisy, narcissism, and materialism throughout, which probably makes After The End sound like some seriously heavy shit. Lyrically, it can be, and this is perhaps no more apparent than in the devastating closing track, “Exile and Ego”: Is it true love or is it heartache or the Angel of Death coming in for a kiss?

Perhaps surprisingly, After The End is as close to ’80s pop as you can get without succumbing completely, with catchy melodies but none of the overblown production values that ruined nearly every good new wave band’s output after 1985. Songs like “Enemy,” “True Monument,” Little Killer,” and “Telephone” would have been massive on college radio in 1985. And that says nothing of the tender tracks like “Life Outside The Mirror,” “Looking Glass Waltz,” and “After The End,” with lyrics and melodies so achingly beautiful, you can almost hear the bruises. So where does Merchandise fit into today’s musical landscape?

That’s a trickier proposition than trying to pinpoint what Merchandise sounds like. Most of the members of Merchandise hail from the cultural waste land of Tampa, Florida, but according to new drummer Elsner Nino, refuse to move away. Therein lies part of their charm and oft-discussed churlishness. The last thing we need is another band with retro influences moving to Brooklyn in a bid to become The Next Big Thing. Such a maneuver might destroy what is so compelling about Merchandise in the first place: no matter what sonic palette they paint with, they remain steadfastly uncompromising.

As amazing as it would be for the band to fully embrace pop, with a name like Merchandise, one feels certain they’d always remain true to their DIY roots. Still, a band like Merchandise is uniquely talented and so unlike much of what’s considered “indie” these days that they actually deserve to be famous. After The End proves there is hope that integrity in modern pop music is not such an impossible proposition after all.

After The End was released by 4AD Records on August 26.

Tour Dates (with Lower):
Fri. Sept. 26 – Tempe, AZ @ 51west
Sat. Sept. 27 – Los Angeles, CA @ Echoplex
Sun. Sept. 28 – San Diego, CA @ Kensington Club
Tue. Sept. 30 – Santa Cruz, CA @ The Catalyst Atrium
Wed. Oct. 1 – San Francisco, CA @ Rickshaw Stop
Fri. Oct. 3 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios
Sat. Oct. 4 – Vancouver, BC @ Biltmore
Sun. Oct. 5 – Seattle, WA @ The Crocodile
Wed. Oct. 8 – Fargo, ND @ The Aquarium
Thu. Oct. 9 – Minneapolis, MN @ Triple Rock
Fri. Oct. 10 – Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle
Sat. Oct. 11 – St Louis, MO @ The Luminary Center for the Arts
Sun. Oct. 12 – Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups
Tue. Oct. 14 – Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg
Wed. Oct. 15 – Toronto, ON @ Wrongbar
Thu. Oct. 16 – Ottawa, ON @ House Of Targ
Fri. Oct. 17 – Montreal, QC @ La Vitrola
Sat. Oct. 18 – Boston, MA @ Great Scott