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Music

A Eulogy for Motion City Soundtrack, the Band That Was a Gateway to Good Music

After almost 20 years of infectious pop songs, the Minneapolis band is calling it a day and it’s your fault for taking them for granted.

Photo: Shervin Lainez

After 19 years of churning out infectious pop songs, doing hundreds of gravity-defying keyboard handstands, and wearing 17 collective tons of Atticus clothing, Minneapolis' Motion City Soundtrack announced on Friday that they will be going on hiatus following their final tour later this year. Fans of "credible" punk may scoff at a band whose audience was largely comprised of teenagers, but in truth Motion City Soundtrack were probably far more capable as artists than often considered. And it was that common misguided perception of the band that is at least partially responsible for their demise. So really, if you are one of the many snobs who took them for granted, their break-up is your fault. We hope you feel good, asshole.

Motion City Soundtrack—who for a majority of their career were comprised of frontman Justin Pierre, guitarist Josh Cain, bassist Matt Taylor, keyboardist Jesse Johnson and drummer Tony Thaxton—may have toured with acts like Relient K and Panic! at the Disco, but in reality the band was far more influenced by Jawbox and Burning Airlines. I remember receiving a demo of their debut I Am The Movie in 2002, which was housed in a floppy disk case in a time before nostalgia colored all of pop culture. While the album will probably be best remembered for the single "The Future Freaks Me Out," the disc also showcased a scrappy punk band that sounded like Superchunk with a pop bent. Songs like "Cambridge" exploded with an urgency that made it seem like it might fall apart at any moment, "Don't Call It A Comeback" combined hardcore's energy with a positively infectious melody, and "Capital H" probably would have been a radio smash if it had come out in the wake of Weezer's Blue Album or Blink-182's Dude Ranch. The band may have played the Warped Tour numerous times throughout their career but there was always a sense that they were doing something slightly more cerebral and engaging than their board short-clad peers, but you were probably just too distracted by booths giving away free stickers to notice.

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Motion City Soundtrack followed up their debut with their breakthrough album Commit This To Memory in the summer of 2005, a magical time which also gave us classic films such as Batman Begins and The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants. The album was produced by Blink-182's Mark Hoppus who helped the band soften the unruly edges of their sound without sacrificing their identity. It paid off, and the single "Everything Is Alright" became a pop punk staple, and possibly the most popular song about obsessive compulsive disorder of all-time. The album also introduced a dark duality that in many ways would become the hallmark of Pierre's songwriting while songs like the fan favorite "Let's Get Fucked Up And Die" tackled the alcohol abuse that would lead him to attend AA meetings during the writing process. Commit This To Memory was also highly influenced by another band recently eulogized, The Weakerthans, who had a similar knack for penning poetic one-liners that could give you hope as easily as they could cut you in half; Motion City Soundtrack just had Johnson's chiming Moog melodies to make the often bittersweet content of the lyrics easier to swallow. Jesse, you are like a punk rock Mary Poppins and don't ever let anyone—especially the readers of this eulogy—ever take that away from you.

Next came Even If It Kills Me, which was half-produced by Ric Ocasek while the other half was produced by Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne and Eli Janney of Girls Against Boys. The album was full of catchy ditties like "Fell In Love Without You" and alternative anthems such as "This Is For Real," but it's also the point where the band began to become misunderstood. Following the album's success they were lumped in with bands like Fall Out Boy and the All-American Rejects, yet the reference points on the album were far more obscure—they were just pushed through a pop filter so fine that you couldn't taste the bittersweet grounds that were always inherent in the band's sound. A sweetly syncopated drumbeat may make the social anxiety-induced "shitstorm" inside of Pierre's brain more palatable on "Where I Belong," but the only thing that MCS shared with Matchbook Romance was a record label. Ditto for sleeper highlight "Calling All Cops," which would have likely garnered more attention from the underground if not for the fact that Pierre could actually sing. For some reason, people think that confronting your demons sounds more authentic with a shaky voice and acoustic guitar, which is the opposite approach that Motion City Soundtrack took throughout their career. As you may have guessed this misappropriated point of view is also your fault and the blame rests firmly on your shoulders.

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Speaking of shoulders, Thaxton shattered his arm in 2009 prior to the recording of the band's singular major-label release, My Dinosaur Life, forcing him with the unorthodox task of recording his parts last. Also produced by Hoppus, the album debuted at #15 on the Billboard charts and contained fan favorites like "Her Words Destroyed My Planet" and "Disappear." While the album featured some of the band's catchiest choruses and most pop-inflected material to date, there was also a healthy does of post-hardcore, reminiscent of acts like Archers Of Loaf or Pegboy on tracks like "Delirium" or "Hysteria." Lyrically—as hinted by the album's title—My Dinosaur Life addressed what it's like to still be slugging it out on the Warped Tour as you enter your thirties and what happens when you follow that thought through to its inevitable conclusion. The song "Skin And Bones" may be propelled by Pierre's familiar vocal presence but when he sings lines like, "What if there's nothing more to me, I'm just skin and bones there's no mystery?" it sounds less like an existential crisis and more of an acceptance of what lies ahead. Don't let the cartoon on the cover of the album fool you, it's actually far more cerebral than most people may assume. Then again at the time you were probably too busy listening to Vampire Weekend to notice.

Following the not-so-hot-by-major-label-stands commercial response to My Dinosaur Life (which is mostly your fault in case you were wondering), the band retreated to their home base of Minneapolis to record their fifth album, Go. This collection was the most curious releases of the band's career, but in many ways is a companion piece to My Dinosaur Life if you reeled things back and made an album without the pressure to have a hit. Things are slower, there's more sonic space and electronic experimentation, but at its core, the lyrical themes are similar. In fact a cursory glance at the tracklisting, which contains songs like "The Worst Is Yet To Come" and "Bad Idea" show that Pierre was still in a dark place when these songs were written… and he wasn't the only one. Thaxton left Motion City Soundtrack shortly after the release (and was replaced by the very capable Claudio Rivera) and atmospheric songs like "Happy Anniversary" sound anything but jubilant. If the future freaked out Motion City Soundtrack a decade earlier with Go, it seemed as if many of their fears had been eerily prescient. Still the album hinted at a sonic depth that the band hadn't quite captured in the past and in retrospect is an interesting detour for a band who seemed to veer off the safe path in favor of taking a dusty side road into the unknown. But hey, complaining about how Girls was ruining Greenpoint was probably a much better use of your time.

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After a tour that saw the band performing four albums over two nights in various cities—a victory lap of sorts—they released their final full-length Panic Stations in 2015, an album that in many ways brought Motion City Soundtrack full circle to where they began. The album was tracked live in two weeks in Minneapolis at the same studio that their heroes like Nirvana and Superchunk cut classic records. Additionally, the album was produced by John Agnello, who is best known for his work with indie icons such as Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and the Hold Steady. In fact Pierre stayed at my apartment in Brooklyn while Agnello spent a week mixing the album—and at one point as I tried to change a lightbulb in my living room while intoxicated, I managed to smash a fixture and spray broken glass all over the futon that he was sleeping on which must have made him further appreciate his newfound sobriety. In many ways, Motion City Soundtrack's swan song was also the album they always wanted to make, as if they had made peace with not becoming the next OK Go and were finally fine with just being Motion City Soundtrack. Songs like "Gravity" combined the band's saccharine sound with something far more aggressive, while ballads like "I Can Feel You" sound like a more upbeat version of Death Cab for Cutie. In hindsight it's no coincidence that Panic Stations contains a song called "Over It Now." At this point they were also over you, the person who thought they were too cool to listen to anything that wasn't approved by Pitchfork.

Which brings us to now. Today the band announced their final tour dates for the immediate future which will see Thaxton returning to the fold one last time to say goodbye. In many ways, you can't blame them. While the band cultivated a large and devoted following over their 19-year tenure, they also never had the kind of commercial breakthrough that always seemed just out of reach. With most of the members married and more than half of them fathers, now seems like the perfect time for them to call it quits and go out with the dignity they maintained throughout their career. Although we'll never be able to gauge how many impressionable fans were turned onto the Merge Records roster or the films of Wes Anderson through Motion City Soundtrack, it's impossible to deny that they made an indelible mark on their younger fans and it's also safe to say they were around for so long that most of us took them for granted, assuming they would be around forever.

They won't be, but their music certainly will, you ungrateful prick.

Everything is not alright with Jonah Bayer. Follow him on Twitter - @mynameisjonah