by Erik van Rheenen

Erik: Welcome to another Transit full-length record community meeting. Let’s get rolling, shall we? This Will Not Define Us, are you here?



This Will Not Define Usis posted up at the refreshments table, throwing jaded looks at the rest of the room between bites of stale cookies.



TWNDU: Do I really have to stick around to talk about Joyride? Huffs audibly.



Erik: As the founding member, obviously.



TWNDU: Talk about poetic justice. Transit certainly didn’t let me define them, did they? When’s the last time you heard one of my songs live? Like, three years ago? It’s like a whole different band wrote Joyride.



Erik: But you could kind of say that, since Tim—



TWNDU: Don’t you dare say “Because Tim Landers left.”



Erik: But, Joyride doesn’t have the same guitar playing teeth you guys did. Or his keen ear for melody. Or his backing vocals, which balance out the whole Joe Boynton factor.



TWNDU: Look, Tim or no Tim, Joyride doesn’t sound anything like my Transit. My Transit was emotionally raw, and had the sonic aesthetic to match. They wrote bleeding heart punk songs tinged with emo and nostalgia. Not whatever the hell you’d call the jangly nonsense that is “Nothing Left to Lose.”



Erik: But isn’t change a good thing? It’s for the best that Transit didn’t rewrite you over and over. I mean, look at Listen and Forgive.



TWNDU: There’s nothing wrong with growing your sound, but Joyride is full of empty-calorie pop songs. I feel the weight behind “Rest to Get Better” — Joe Boynton sure sounds like he’s unleashing pent-up frustration at his failing sleep patterns — but listen to songs like “Saturday, Sunday” or “Too Little, Too Late.” I get that repetition and catchy choruses are two potent weapons in a band’s arsenal, but Transit get a little too liberal with them.



Erik: Keep This To Yourself, any thoughts on the newest member?



Keep This To Yourself stands in the back corner of the room, arms folded over its chest, a crumpled Dixie cup of lukewarm lemonade in its hand.



KTTY: Has Transit started playing more of my songs than “Please, Head North?”



Erik: Well, no, but—

KTTY: Whatever. So, yeah, Joyride isn’t the punk/emo hybrid fans came to expect before, well, you know…



KTTY jabs its free thumb over to a foldout table, where Young New Englandis scribbling with crayons.



Erik: Yeah, I know.



KTTY: But even at their most punk-leaning moments, memorable hooks have always been a mainstay in the band’s body of work. So even if Joyride’s songs don’t have the lyrical clout that made me sound like a few pages ripped from Joe Boynton’s handwritten journal, you can’t say that the glossy hooks on the record don’t get stuck in your head. I’ve been tapping the melody to “Sweet Resistance” with my feet for days.



Erik: You and me both, man.



KTTY: And there’s glimmers of quotable wordplay, even if the lyrics here are a dull shadow of the band’s best writing. “Heaven is what you make it/Hell is what you’re putting me through,” while a little cliché, works in the opener, “The Only One.” Which, you have to admit, works really well as a one-two opening punch with “Rest to Get Better.”



Erik: No arguments there. Listen and Forgive, your two cents?



The rest of the albums sigh loudly, except Young New England, who is clearly coloring outside the lines of its activity book.



KTTY: Him again?



TWNDU: We always talk about him.



LAF: Can you blame everyone, though? I’m only the benchmark that Transit records will be held against because that’s what the fans made me.



Erik: And can you blame them? Listen and Forgive is stellar, guys. You have to admit — when it first came out, it was the perfect encapsulation of what Transit stood for and where we hoped they’d go. And then some. Sparkling production value, a sound drenched in harried nostalgia and steeped in ‘90s emo guitar layering, minus any unnecessary noodling, and it was the bridge for fans to cross from the band’s earlier pop-punk leanings to something more mature.



Listen and Forgive nods its head in an “Aw, shucks” kind of bow.



LAF: I think listeners latched on to me as quickly as they did because I marked incredible progress and maturity for the band — the Transit that wrote and recorded me sounded wise beyond their years, a few lyrical missteps aside. Fans didn’t expect an album like me after Keep This To Yourself, but after I was released, they wanted to see just how far Transit could deliver on their newfound direction. And, well, after—



Listen and Forgive points to Young New England, who is haphazardly pulling crayons out of his 64 box of Crayola’s.



LAF: Joyride just feels like a lateral move. It just feels like a safe album. It’s almost the band wrote a risk free, bouncy pop-rock record to wash the taste of Young New England out.



Erik: I’d almost call it boring if it wasn’t for the memorable choruses on this thing. It’s just kind of there. It’s instrumentally flat.



LAF: Flat’s a good word for it. The catchiness stretches as wide as the whole record, but don’t bother digging any deeper than your first few listens, because it’s a shallow kind of catchy, void of any meaning besides “This sounds kind of okay, I guess.”



Erik rubs his temples, and glances over to Young New England.



Erik: All right, YNE. Can I call you YNE? Have any thoughts to add?



Young New England stands up excitedly. The other albums groan in unison.



YNE: I know, I know. But here’s what’s good about Joyride: it sounds better than I did, and it’s not really even a close contest. My production sounded hollow and wooden, and wouldn’t have done good songs (“Weathered Souls” and “Nothing Lasts Forever,” mostly) any good favors, let alone the songwriting exercises in futility that made me pretty universally loathed.



Erik: Yeah, sure, the production is stronger on Joyride, but I’m not so quick to call it good. Maybe it’s the songwriting — three-fourths of the album’s tracks are content in just meandering around the same tired melodies — but the songs here sound like they picked style over substance. Not to mention that Joe Boynton’s vocals are absolutely drowning in pitch correction techniques. Noticeably so.



YNE: And you can say all you want about my songwriting, but at least I had a creative theme. An arc.



LAF: Diving off a cliff is not an arc, Young New England.



YNE: Okay, so maybe it wasn’t executed all that well.



Erik: Or well at all. Fleetingly well.



YNE: I get it. But my Transit wrote songs about what it meant to be young and growing up as a New Englander, and was about shaping the band’s youthful identity by hinging it to a deep sense of place — almost to the point of lyrically alienating fans that don’t hail from the Northeast. But in the allusions to New England landmarks, we learned about the band. Lake Q was about finding serenity in gypsy-like escapism. The north shores of Boston weathered the soul of Transit like a beaten shoreline.



Erik: And “Boston never drinks alone?”



YNE: That’s…just a bad line. But what sinks Joyride is that it’s an album about nothing. There are the same themes that float around any other album — love, loss, coming of age — but the band does nothing interesting with them, other than noting that they exist. For all my shortcomings, at least I had something to say.



Listen and Forgive nods in agreement.



LAF: You know what? He’s right.



Erik: So, we can all agree that Joyride adds nothing interesting to the discussion, lyrically or musically?



The albums nod in agreement, except Young New England, who has returned to his coloring book.



Erik: Awesome. Meeting adjourned.