About halfway through Sorry For Your Loss, the debut album from Milwaukee “bubble grunge” group Breakup Tour, two characters grapple with the unrelenting march of time. “The older that you get, the harder the hangovers hit,” Breakup Tour sings. Too true, Breakup Tour. Too true.
The song is “Maddy Says (You’re Ruining Your Life),” and it’s a song about aging out of a scene that once gave you life. But it’s also a song about relationships. And the end of relationships. And fentanyl and opioid abuse. And Twin Peaks references. And it’s dedicated to the memory of David Lynch and to the importance of learning how to administer Narcan. And it’s a beautifully resigned power-pop bop.
That soda fountain cocktail of subject matter and references is typical of Breakup Tour. The band formed during the 2020 pandemic, cobbling itself together from a host of other Milwaukee groups: Nat Otto (Man Random), Sam Schrader (Bureaucratic Drift), D.H. Thomas (The Unitaskers), and Amy Upthagrove (June Gloom, Intolerable Swill). Sorry For Your Loss finds those musicians sharing songwriting and vocal duties (sometimes in a single song) and delivering winning tracks with Very Online parenthetical titles like “I’m In Debt (No One’s Gay For Moleman)” and “Born Dizzy (Ever Heard Of The Knife Alien?).” Well, have you, Scully?
There’s a lot to dig into here: Opener “(At Least We Still Hate) The Same Shit!” is a shambling Weezer-esque sing-a-long. Closer “Weezer Snuggie (That’s Me…The Dude Who Dinks It Up)” is oddly less Weezer-esque, but a hilarious snapshot of millennial ennui nonetheless. The excellent “All For Nothing (Forget It Piper, It’s Halloweentown)” adds some Omnichord and bubbly “woo-hoo”s to the mix, and “Anxiousness vs. Avoidance (I Love You. Here’s $100.)” takes a dash of scuffed-up Queens Of The Stone Age and spikes it with some scuffed-up surf-rock.
Near the end of Sorry For Your Loss, the one-two punch of “Streetlights (Sometimes Things That Are Expensive Are Worse)” and “In The Fall (I’m Afraid You’re Getting Sick Of Me)” knocks things into surprisingly tender territory. The latter is a melancholy meditation on not-quite-there connections (framed by the Halloween franchise, no less), and the former features some of the record’s most piercing lyrics:
I wanna see you when the stars come out at night
But that’s the kicker, the city’s way too bright
Maybe we’ll find time when the days start getting longer
But I wouldn’t count on it
No, I wouldn’t count on it
Those songs are typical of Breakup Tour, too: sharing the memes while tugging the heartstrings. And yep, the older that you get, the harder the second thing hits.
Breakup Tour will celebrate the release of Sorry For Your Loss Saturday, October 18 at Sugar Maple. Mizzy, Known Moons, and Killer High Life will play in support. That’s a fantastic lineup.
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