Again For The Win "We've Been Here Forever" (Deep Elm)
Right from the start, this band was working an uphill battle with me because of their name. (Okay, in typing that sentence and reading it back I fully realize that “Uphill Battle” is also a somewhat overused band name) The thing about Again For The Win is that they really want to abbreviate their name “AFTW”, which is fine by me, and I’m not saying that they believe this but far too many teenage kids these days believe that “FTW” stands for “For The Win”. Several years ago, I first introduced to the notion that “FTW” stood for “For The Win” only because Colt Cabana was complaining about how everyone thought it stood for that instead of what it really stands for to those who know.
Further proof of my believing that these guys speak internet is the line in “Having Heard Sirens”, “Pictures or it didn’t happen isn’t good enough anymore”, which is something I’ve been saying ever since I’ve been petitioning to change that particular saying to “Instagram or it didn’t happen”, but I digress. This has very little to do with their music now, doesn’t it? I seem to have gotten completely off track. How do I get back?
I could pull out a lot of references to other bands to explain this to you—bands from Five Eight and Keepsake to an edgier Flaming Lips (whatever “edgier” means exactly)—but I think I’ll let the first song do all of the explaining. It starts by kicking into this almost spoken verse that then goes into a much heavier chorus. It is pretty much one of the best song structures in terms of verse-chorus-verse that I have heard in quite a while. This pattern doesn’t hold true for the rest of the album, but it still maintains the rock/power pop/etc. sound that you’ll hear from the very first note. I dig it for sure. Reminds me of when I used to find really obscure bands and listen to them when no one else did like A Trunk Full of Dead Bodies.
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