SWMRS, after a 3-year hiatus, made a reappearance into the music scene with their fourth album, Berkley’s on Fire. Their punk style was on its way to dominating the alt-rock scene, since not many contemporary bands can put off that kind of boldness. Berkley’s on Fire is similar to their other releases, but this time around they added a mainstream pop twist. They did this in a very haphazard way; punk rock is supposed to be riotous, but SWMRS’s use of disorganized fun in this album isn’t what it used to be.
Freshly outdated
For those looking to take a trip down memory lane, this album is a one-way ticket straight back to your days of teen angst and rebellion. Punk rock is still alive and well, but somehow SWMRS manages to flashback to 2002 with an album created in 2019. Compared to the rest of their discography, this album stands alone in its incredible ability to sound outdated, despite just recently being released. This album sounds like it belongs in a playlist with Blink-182 and early Panic! At the Disco. Berkley’s on Fire could have been a thriving piece of work if it were produced during the glory days of Green Day.
The reason for the sound wave of nostalgia in Berkley’s on Fire is the offbeat introduction of age-old pop along with their original style. The pop sounds that they incorporate aren’t completely modern. Instead, SWMRS add in a bit of late 90s/early 2000s pop instrumentals. That particular flair mixed with garage-punk generates a perfect formula for flashbacks.
Adding pop to their near-perfect style was a mistake in itself, but what makes it worse is the fact that they didn’t approach it in a musically fluent way.
Slapdash genre adjustments
Berkley’s on Fire just barely strays away from the original SWMRS borderline scream-punk, as featured in their 2016 album, Drive North. It had a perfected style, and they should’ve kept to that. Their old arrangements, counting both instrumentation and lyricism, were helter-skelter gateways to rebellious attitudes. With Berkley’s on Fire, they accidentally create a new genre: pop/punk musical chaos.
SWMRS still stayed within the bounds of their comfort zone, but the rock in their latest album is overshadowed by their sorry attempt at adding modern pop into their progressions. It almost takes being a die-hard fan of SWMRS to like this album because it kind of disgraces the hard punk they were on track to being known for. They epitomized the good punk sound, but now they are just another band that seemingly fell to the temptation of joining the pop trend.
In general, the pop-punk genre might appeal to some. The reason this didn’t really work for SWMRS is because it’s necessary to have an understanding of the arrangements in each genre, as well as the know-how for formulating a way to blend those. SWMRS apparently doesn’t have much of a knack for that. Their way of clashing the two genres together makes for a very choppy track list.
Something that makes punk rock its unruly self is the lawlessness and the off-the-wall compositions. However, it’s still necessary for carelessness to be somewhat organized in song. In almost every track, the guitars and drums are doing completely opposite things; they don’t complement each other at all to form a unified melody. This is noticeable even in the first track, “Berkley’s on Fire.” It’s almost as if the instrumentation is split evenly between 80’s pop and punk. This results in horrible flow and lack of rhythm, which is something that’s pretty hard to mess up in a punk-rock genre where songs are infamous for being disorderly. This tendency continues throughout most of the other ten songs on the record.
There are exceptions to every trend, and the exceptions here come in the form of the slow-tempo lulls in Berkley’s on Fire. This album incorporates more slow songs than we’re used to, providing yet another abnormality for punk records. Though the slower tracks have more compositional flow, they’re still not what anyone is looking for in an ungovernable genre.
SWMRS tried way too hard — or perhaps not hard enough — to throw in pop while still trying to keep that rebellious rock spirit. This genre-mixing was nowhere near successful for Berkley’s on Fire. This might be since it gives some of us cringe-inducing flashbacks to our early days of trying to be edgy, and it just makes us uncomfortable trying to jam to it now. Maybe it’s just that SWMRS couldn’t quite pull of genre-mixing.
Top Tracks:
Lose Lose Lose
April in Houston
Trashbag Baby
Recommended if you like:
The Wrecks
Sorority Noise
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