(Pop-Punk, Garage) Audacity - Butter Knife - 2013, MP3, 320 kbps

You have to hand it to Audacity: it's one hell of an uphill battle to sustain a band in Fullerton, California. As any of the handful of artists who've done it recently will attest, that the band (Audacity, but also its members' previous incarnations—Nontoxic, the Plaid, the Attachments) has been whacking away at its bratty garage rock for nearly a decade, slogging through their often-sceneless pocket of Orange County, eventually finding a home with the likeminded Burger Records guys (at the time they were just the band Thee Makeout Party!), releasing what seem like countless EPs and 7"'s, and building a community in the meantime, is certainly not an accomplishment to sneeze at.
That nine-year slosh has brought them to their third full-length Butter Knife. With this new record, Audacity prove two things. First, that they've perfected the art of the party-rock anthem. They're impressively dutiful students of the genre, to the point where their music is built from the sum of its forbears: There's the endless, stereotypical taunts and judgments of those who've left their circle: "Are you ashamed you turned into a square?" vocalists Kyle Andrew Gibson and Matt Schmalfeld cry, typically, on "Hole in the Sky". There's a worried-about-growing-up emo throwback in closer "Autumn", with the line "How many stars should I wish upon tonight?/ How many stars are in the sky tonight?" "Rooster", the mid-record tempo-kill, takes on a whiny Weezer hue, while "Pick Slide", the album's second shortest track, is Hives-esque. Strains of Atlanta's Black Lips and even a smidgen of the Descendents' nasty kiditude are loomingly present throughout. There's rarely a somber moment—even the slow songs can't help but pick up toward the end—because that's the point: tear through adolescence as joyfully and stubbornly as possible, pausing only briefly to consider self-reflection. Butter Knife, like any of Audacity's records, is pretty clear on what it's here for, and what it's not.
The other thing the band proves with it, however, is that there's only so far one can take that deftly honed identity, the one that exists within a niche that's already established its own limits. Where songcraft makes the quartet technically proficient garage rockers, their personality is hard to distinguish from their local peers; one could replace mentions of FIDLAR in a review of FIDLAR with "Audacity" and not get the wrong idea. Butter Knife is a demonstration they've conducted before, too; last July's Mellow Cruisers, released via Burger and Recess Records, essentially accomplished the same task in three fewer songs. Songs bleed into each other, and 36 minutes begin to feel like 50. (Shouldn't punchy, scratchy punk records feel like they're slapping you in the face and running away, egging you onto the next house show?) Where roiling, basement-shaking jams about the Orange County bum-around life can compel audiences to crash into one another, sweaty and grinning, they have a tendency to become white noise when shoved together on a full-length record, especially one with the polished sound of a bigger production budget, and released into a sea of albums that are already holding their own house parties, simultaneously, all over the country.
Combine all of that with the fact that Audacity have already reissued two EPs this year and released another quite similar LP 15 months ago, and you've got yourself a perfect, forgettable storm of sunshine rock. And while this doesn't necessarily apply to the appetite of Audacity's audience—few scenes are more consistently dedicated to each other, musically and otherwise, than the plucky skater-bro slack-rock crowd—it does tend to caricaturize and flatten them in a recording context. They become Punk Muzak: the creative stall of playing to form and having little else to add outside of live performance that easily kills the fun of sun-drenched, bratty Peter Pan mantras upon takeaway—an interminable state of arrested development, crystallized in mp3. This is how records for scenes like this eventually become tokens, short-run memorabilia that exist to prove the experience was real.