Digger: Monte Carlo

Digger: Monte Carlo

2000

Hopeless Records

Format I Own it on: Vinyl

Track Listing: 1.  Detroit River  2. Feeling What I'm Saying  3.  Slur  4. Lucky  5. Nervous Reaction  6.  Plastic Wings  7. Postcards Across The Atlantic  8. Living It Up  9.  Taking The Consequences  10.  Round 2  11. I Hate You When You're Sleeping  12. Dragging My Feet  13.  Trying  14. Alcohol, Women, And Misery



The other day I was talking about how much I equate "The Promise of an Uncertain Future" with my college days, "Monte Carlo," however came out well after I had finished college and moved into the lucrative career field of pizza delivery! 

Don't let anyone tell you a good liberal arts education doesn't pay off!! That last customer left me a five dollar tip!!!

 To be honest, I think working at a pizza joint is one of the most valuable educations a person can receive...If I never worked at one I wouldn't have ever seen a grown man chase a customer outside of a building grabbing his groin and shouting, "EEEAAAT THIIIIS!!!"...And then there was the time a woman who worked there buttered a guy's dick using the same brush that was used to put garlic butter on the pizza crust... Don't worry! She washed it afterwards (on the other hand,  there's not enough Palmolive in the world to wash that mental image from your mind)...

To this day, the minute I put on "Monte Carlo" the scent of crazy bread wafts through my memories and I suddenly get a garlic knot in my throat...Come to think of it, I think I had a lot more fun delivering pizzas than going to college...So my advice to the graduating class of 2015 is to skip Harvard altogether and go straight to Domino's...

Oh, and if you were around and listening to music back in 2000, you'll recall it was the era where emo had completely overtaken the punk scene...I consider 1998-2000 to be the years where 90's pop punk truly died...Shortly after the release of "Monte Carlo," the familiar Hopeless Records roster of pop-punk bands were replaced by groups devoted to the pursuit of faceless mall-emo and shit-screamo...

...but "Monte Carlo" appeared briefly before all this...Before emo was a dirty word...Before even I (a man who owns multiple Sugar Ray albums) was embarrassed to admit that I enjoyed the genre...Despite all my emo ramblings, I'd still classify the majority of this album as the band's usual brand of angsty-yet-good-natured pop-punk...The E-word is mostly contained to a couple of select tracks (" Plastic Wings" and  "Alcohol, Women, And Misery"), but it's hard not to notice a certain Get Up Kids-iness creeping into their sound...50's style pop melodies have been replaced by Moog sequences and "best time of your life" lyrics...It often comes across as pop-punk without any pop hooks in it, which made the whole thing run together for the first month or so that I listened to it...But remember, I was a pizza guy back then...Broke as fuck! If I spent $10 on a mail order CD from Hopeless, I was going to get my money's worth, by God, so I listened to it and listened to it and listened to it...

Eventually, shapes began to emerge from the mist...Turns out "Feeling What I'm Saying" is a pop-punker just as catchy as anything else they'd ever released and it was interesting to hear them toughening up their punk in some places ("Detroit River") while softening it up in others (again, "Alcohol, Women, And Misery")...For something that seemed so monolithic on first impression,  it  actually turned out to have a lot of depth...

On first listen I assumed that they'd embraced emo because..well, they had to...After all, wouldn't it have been tacky to release a straight-up pop-punk album in 2000?! But eventually I had to revise my original opinion...I truly think these guys were feeling emo at the time...The band sounded noticeably bitchier and homesick...The lyrics alternate between bitter recriminations against some unspecified other with tales of travel fatigue...Driving on three hours sleep...Postcards sent across the Atlantic...Those kind of things...That odd malaise where something's wrong but nothing's wrong...I remember there being a lot of this feeling going around at that time..Like I said earlier...Garlic knots...

This brings me to a few months back where Jens and I were reminiscing about 90's Hopeless Records and it struck me I hadn't heard "Monte Carlo" in a long time...As a lark, I went to the band's website and went straight to their vinyl section...After scrolling through pages of Taking Back Sundays, and Wait Until Wednesdays, and Scream About Thursdays, I started to run across names I hadn't seen in awhile...The Nobodys...Selby Tigers...Falling Sickness...Digger...Their vinyl was reasonably priced ($10.00 a pop) so we ordered a big, fat pile of records...In that pile was "Monte Carlo" and it felt great to revisit it...I honestly can't imagine relating to something this self-absorbed now, but I couldn't imagine my life without it then...So let's toast to all those long-forgotten emo/pop-punk bands that brought us so much joy with their misery! Hear hear! 

Here's  "Feeling What I'm Saying" by Digger...Enjoy...