by Erik van Rheenen

Four Year Strong sprung a corker of a surprise on the pop-punk community by announcing both the flawlessly follicled Worcester outfit’s deal with Pure Noise Records and return to the recorded music fray with the Go Down in History EP — with a marathon stint on the Vans Warped Tour to match. Fans heralded the summer of 2014 as a kind of redux version of 2009. The “Easycore Revival” banner was unfurled. The band was back to chugging out hardcore-tinged pop-punk, the tracklist boasting the same kind of silly movie-referencing song titles that were part of Rise Or Die Trying and Enemy of the World’s none-too-serious charm. Listeners rediagnosed their malaise for 2011’s In Some Way, Shape, or Form and its grungy, alternative rock leanings as three year’s worth of selective amnesia. It’s like the album AbsolutePunk reviewer and occasional PropertyOfZack contributor Thomas Nassiff called (albeit fairly), “ a beast of a heavy, radio-y rock group” buoyed by a veering, Rise Against-ish turn towards the alternative charts and an “’okay’ overall performance” never happened. Easycore is back, baby!



If Nassiff, an incredibly savvy writer with his finger pretty firmly on the pulse of the vein of pop-punk popularity, thought In Some Way, Shape, or Form was the first step towards Four Year Strong’s ascension to radio airplay and kicking down the door of being an amphitheater playing, name-brand rock band, well, why the hell isn’t Go Down in History the same kind of mature alt rock as its forerunner? I’ll take the blame and freely admit I spurned ISWSOF as the moody older brother to RODT and EOTW, an album that stands in the corner with its arms crossed, biting the inside of its cheeks as its two more famous, playful younger brothers run amok and get into all kinds of juvenile antics. I missed the rabble-rousing sing-alongs and breakdowns and lyrics that just felt right finger pointing to. Whether I was pointing them at Alan Day and Dan O’Connor in concert, or at the ceiling of my car didn’t matter. Those records were fun, and ISWSOF was dour, straight-faced, and serious.



But the reason I think fans — myself included — jilted ISWSOF (which, revisited, is a perfectly serviceable rock record with some lofty ambitions) was because, prior to the band’s alienating fourth LP, Four Year Strong was the face of Easycore, the pop-punk/hardcore hybrid that felt all the rage in the mid-2000s. While the band didn’t rush out a bunch of “Defend Easycore” baseball tees, the synonymy and utter transitiveness between “Four Year Strong” and “Easycore” made the genre label awful hard to shirk. Who knows whether Four Year Strong felt like they outgrew the Easycore genre or wanted to mature their sound or felt label pressures to write a more grown up rock record. That part doesn’t matter. When fans put a band in a branded box — Four Year Strong is an Easycore band, Set Your Goals has to be FYS’ Easycore foil, Man Overboard can only defend pop punk — well, it’s hard to get out. And getting trapped in that box stifles the creative juices from flowing. Just look at New Found Glory: they’ve been in the hardcore-tinged pop-punk box for years, and the one time they tried to pull a Houdini (the criminally underrated Coming Home, peaking at #19 on the Billboard charts), it was easily eclipsed in their discography by the significantly more standard-issue NFG pop-punk of Catalyst (#3), Sticks and Stones (#4), and retread Not Without a Fight (#12).



It’s easy to find a spot in the box. It’s tough to get back out.



I’m not saying having a genre branding is a terrible thing. In fact, it’s kind of brilliant. Having association-value with an offshoot of a popular genre (i.e. Easycore, “Defend” Pop-Punk, any other genre-ish slogan that’s been slapped on T-shirts) is a valuable way to grow a fanbase. Man Overboard’s iconic rifle-bearing “Defend Pop Punk” logo was/is a masterstroke in pop-punk sloganeering, and whether or not you sang along proudly or scoffed under your breath, the “sleepy eyes, bony knees” branding Real Friends earned brought your attention to the band. But, if Man Overboard feels like stretching outside the boundaries of pop-punk and write an album that sounds virtually nothing like its predecessors, will fans allow the OG Defenders of Pop-Punk to lay down arms and stretch their creative muscles? Even if Maybe This Place is the Same and We’re Just Changing didn’t reinvent the Real Friends formula, the band learned (probably from jokes at Put Yourself Back Together’s expense) that you can only write so many songs referencing sleepy eyes and bony knees until that shtick gets tired. But that’s almost the expectation that their band branding sets up.



And it’s not fans fault — branding breeds familiarity, and familiarity is usually what keeps us coming back to our favorite bands. We like when a band’s sound pivots on a stable set of tricks and tropes, expanding sonically but never straying too far from what we liked about the band when we first met. Look at quote-unquote Risecore bands: it’s easy for non-fans to laugh off the screamed-verses-sang-choruses-BREAKDOWN! formula perfected by Rise Records’ stable of post-hardcore groups, but that Risecore sound/branding sells a ton of copies year in, and year out. Why should that formula change? Sometimes, the box is comfortable, and bands are content to reap their rewards there.



But just because a band keeps the lid closed on themselves doesn’t mean fans should clamor to slam their fists down on a band trying to shed a sound or notion they branded themselves with, even if it means a return to familiarity, a la Go Down in History. Bands should be able to outgrow labels and slogans as they see fit, whether to boldly venture down new creative avenues, or simply maturing beyond the ideas they started with. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to see the dudes of Man Overboard stuck playing four-chord pop-punk late in their forties because fans want them to stay the young band that branded themselves Pop Punk Defenders.



If Schrödinger’s Band feels pressured by fans to stick to a slogan, motto, or genre branding they dreamed up as a naïve young outfit instead of branching out sonically, shedding its own genre label, or rebranding for the sake of maturity, the box won’t open. And while Schrödinger didn’t point out the obvious in his famous thought experiment, I will: if that box stays closed long enough, eventually Schrodinger’s band will suffocate.