The Academy Is . . . - Almost Here (2005)Unlike most of the albums I've been revisiting, this is one of the few where I honestly can't remember how I found it. It's very likely that it found it's way into The Blaze offices or something, but my discovering this record is fairly unremarkable comparatively to something like Clarity for me.
What I do know? I really like this album. It seems this record happened as I started to drift away from the world of pop/punk, a genre I had championed early on in high school with bands like New Found Glory and Saves the Day. From this point on there are only a handful of "pop/punk" I can admit to liking, mostly having to do with my job or the band being friends from AZ (we LOVE pop punk there) Even this Summer at Warped Tour, it became clear that it wasn't the scene that changed, I just got old. There were the same skater kids and neon advertisements, just a little more texting and guy-liner. Perspective changes when you're an adult, I guess.
The nice thing about this record is that I felt I could still champion it in the same way 15 year old Ashley would have. I remember taking a friend home and making him listen to "Attention" because I couldn't stop listening to it. I'd throw it on at The Blaze every once in a while and made many efforts to see them live (still haven't yet though) The songs were catchy yet cynical, a nice segue from the happy-go-lucky of some of my earlier pop/punk band crushes to some of the self-deprecating emo/folk I'd get into later. Neither extreme describes me in one way or another, but it's nice to have a little of both sometimes.
As unremarkable as my finding them was, my review of them is also unremarkable. But that's okay sometimes. There's no reason to dissect a record that's just plain good, right? Right. Let's get over our pretensions and just enjoy it. That's what made that genre fun for a lot of us, and something I have to remind myself to do once in a while.
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