“Life Can Be So Dull”: Turnstile’s Never Enough
Nonstop feelings.
When the singles for Turnstile‘s recently released fifth LP Never Enough began trickling out, it was immediately obvious—so obvious that to even comment on it seems facile—that the band would be continuing the aesthetic and sound of 2021’s breakout Glow On. While I would eventually come to appreciate the album as a whole, I wrote glowingly about the real summer blockbuster Turnstile Love Connection EP twice that year, including it in my year-end Top Ten while applauding the band for figuring things out after 2018’s Time & Space. (Listening back to Time & Space now, I’m not sure why I had such a problem with it. We grow attached and fickle. So it goes.) The 10-minute video for the 4-song EP was impeccably stylish, a band frolicking in seductive self-assuredness. It moved in a silky slow motion with folks adorned in dad hats, bucket hats, solid pastels. Everyone was invited, it screamed, and you felt it. You felt a part of this big, amorphous thing called hardcore. Tracks like “Holiday” and “T.L.C.” remain infectious, unique, refreshing. I listen to them, and I am energized. We are all Brendan Yates, whirling dervish of Baltimore hardcore.
Two other things struck me about those singles: (1) I found the slo-mo congregational always-panning-in-pantone less inspired and more of a flag-planting of commercial identity this time around, and (2) I thought the songs, other than “BIRDS,” were bad. I got self-conscious, though. Was I overreacting and pearl-clutching like I did in 2018 when Pressure to Succeed and Step 2 Rhythm were becoming distant memories? Was I begrudging the band their success? “I was getting bloody noses moshing to ‘Bad Wave’ in Purgatory at the old Masquerade!” I could hear a terribly boring part of my self start to curmudgeonly protest. How hum drum and tedious. How predictable and trite.
My first few listens through Never Enough were perplexing, a sort of mildly agonizing look-at-yourself-in-the-mirror process of coming to terms with… what? Had all that mundane stinginess metastasized into something more insidious? I felt on some level to be curling into myself, a black bile working its way into my ears and esophagus. It’s all the same it’s all the same it’s all the same! It’s all the same but worse.
That feeling fell away, sloughed off in the sparkling realization that the album made me feel old. What a relief! It is not that the record is an unimaginative rehashing of Glow On adorned and festooned with fake tinsel and plastic garlands. I’m upset because while I felt included in the celebration of Turnstile Love Connection, I feel excluded from this. The band has found a way to time travel, to stay beautiful and young and vivacious, while I am but flabby wreckage strewn on the unforgiving rocks of the shores of my late 30s. Sure, literally every other hardcore band has the exact opposite effect on me, but that’s not dispositive. Here I am, Dorian Gray, having forgotten to hide “that fatal canvas” the night before as it now leers in the sunlight. I then laughed to myself: those odious horns in “DREAMING” is the sound Frank plays that Jenna pretends not to hear as she shouts above it in that great 30 Rock bit.
But no! This is no blood-sweating portrait haunting me with my own mortality. To be sure, my own mortality does haunt me, but that’s not Turnstile’s fault nor is it what’s happening on Never Enough.
What’s happening on Never Enough is that the album sucks.
Or, if it doesn’t necessarily suck, it isn’t very good. Much of the album is spent, by design, drifting along in a kind of hazy ambience. “SUNSHOWER” is 90 seconds of hardcore and then 2 minutes of Marina Raye fluting. This happens all over the album: short, simple bursts of songs that have maybe one idea then turn into wafting, meandering synths. It would be pleasant if it wasn’t so ponderous. There are, to be sure, songs I like. “LOOK OUT FOR ME” is probably the best track on the album. “SLOWDIVE,” with its re-working of the riff from “Sweet Leaf,” is a catchy mid-paced stomp. “LIGHT DESIGN” and the aforementioned “BIRDS” are cool, though the latter, and let’s be very honest with ourselves, is just “TLC” but less compelling. It’s so similar that you can’t hear or see anything except the end of the “TLC” video when Brendan runs out of the set, leaps into the air, thanks us for letting him be himself, and jumps onto a motorcycle to ride away into massive success. “DULL,” too, I like, but it lacks the weight and purport of its clear intertext “Dull” by Samiam.
That, I think, is the crux of the issue. On “DULL,” we’re “waiting for the call.” On “Dull,” we’re dreading “another long and lonely weekend without anyone to call.” On “DULL,” we’re “going dull” from “the ringing when you talk.” On “Dull,” we sometimes think we “know why he put that bullet in his skull.” Both songs aim to contrast the dullness of life with a propulsive energy; they want to commiserate and liberate. It’s a triumph to keep living. But one song has stakes and the other simply doesn’t. And there’s the hitch: “Deep in my mind,” sings Turnstile, “it’s immaterial.” To be sure, Turnstile’s intonation of “it’s immaterial” is to empathize with the feeling of the sometimes crushing quotidian nature of life, but it’s accidentally revelatory of the album’s biggest problem. In the album’s unbearably light design, everything is rendered inconsequential. In constantly retreating to the ephemeral, it leaves everything fleeting and transitory. Life, though long and beautiful, is also fleeting and transitory, but your album should not be. It should have heft, weight. It should make demands equally on artist and audience. It should, above all, stick. It cannot be, above all else, an thin veneer of—ugh—vibes. “All art is quite useless,” writes Oscar Wilde in the prefatory remarks to Dorian Gray, though he meant that in a socialist anti-use value kind of way. Art as antidote to capitalism. What is so disappointing about Never Enough is that it simply doesn’t function much as art, because if all art is “at once surface and symbol,” what is something that is only surface?
Beyond the indulgent amount of interludic faffing and a generally rehashed sound from Glow On, the band has gussied up their sound not with better riffs or more exciting breakdowns or thrilling sing-alongs but instead with brief forays into shimmery ’80s pop and a touch of funkiness here and there—those plastic garlands I mentioned before. It’s clear, at least to me, what album Turnstile really wanted to write, though they stayed unnecessarily moored to their ever-vanishing past. It’s these slight adornments that led me to the lasting image of this album in my head. Funk, pop, plastic. Funko Pops. They don’t do much. You can’t do much with them except collect them and put them on a shelf. They are a cutesy, endlessly reproducible shell of an otherwise beloved person or character. With Never Enough, I fear Turnstile has turned into the ultimate piece of commodification, a simulacrum of itself.
I love Turnstile. I’ve loved them since those first two 7″s. They are one of the bands that soundtracked the first few years of graduate school, a near-constant companion in those bizarre, freewheeling days. I love Nonstop Feeling as much as I love Turnstile Love Connection. They have been so utterly free, and they’ve made me feel a similar sense of freedom. But we all freeze, caught between impulses and unsure of how to proceed. Sometimes we don’t notice that we’re stuck.
Never Enough was released via Roadrunner Records
earlier this month. You can’t get it on Bandcamp.
It’s okay if you like the record!
