The Menzingers

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The Menzingers

The Menzingers "On The Impossible Past" album

- Release date : February 2012 -

"On the Impossible Past" is the third full-length release from the punk rock band The Menzingers and their first on Epitaph Records. It was released on February 21, 2012.

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"On The Impossible Past" album reviews

On the Impossible Past is the sort of rarefied album that doesn't come along often; it’s the type of record that, even only after a month of listening, I know will become regarded as a treasure. Riddled with thematic landscapes, On the Impossible Past presents a story, but it’s such a compelling, poetic and well-told story that by the time it ends, I need to hear it again. Right after listening to the album, I want to hear about the American muscle cars, the waitresses working at the diners, the late-night drives, the drunken escapades, the passion and dead-end-liness of everyday living, the good things and the nice things, I want to hear about all of these things all over again.

[...] The Menzingers have moved past whatever they used to be. Once a punk rock group amongst a community of punk rock groups, On the Impossible Past has transformed them into a band of great American storytellers that not only deserve to be mentioned along with the best in the scene, but deserve your actual, undivided attention. This isn’t an album that should be listened to while you’re on Facebook in the background; this is an album that should have come out decades ago, before music would leak a month before its release date, so we could all sit at the foot of our beds and read along with the lyrics in the insert while we watched the record spin on our turntables. This is something that has no expiration date.

*** by Thomas Nassiff, Absolute Punk ***

Pennsylvania's the Menzingers have been operating on a cycle of great expectations and fulfilling them since before breakthrough album Chamberlain Waits was released in 2010. And on their new full-length, much-anticipated Epitaph debut On The Impossible Past, they exceed expectations once again. Kicking off with "Good Things," a song that starts small and explodes (not unlike another standout, "Ava House"), it's a track about a touring act's road weariness, but in the context of the album's 13 tracks, it's a steady unravelling as a band of great, young American storytellers. Anthemic is a word that easily gets overused when talking about pop-punk, but it'd be a disservice to the Menzingers to not mention their knack for the grandiose. "Gates" is a masterful (and very Clash-like) pop song that successfully expands their musical scope, while "The Obituaries" and "Nice Things" get dirty enough in the choruses to satisfy the stage divers once more. On the Impossible Past's ambitions may be bigger than its punk britches, which is good, because it shouldn't go overlooked.

*** by Nicole Villeneuve, Exclaim ***