After releasing the sleeper hit, Sports, in 2012 via Lame-O Records, which eventually received the re-issue treatment from Run For Cover Records, Modern Baseball are already back with a new full-length album entitled You’re Gonna Miss It All. Like its predecessor, the record possesses the emo trait of personal, confessional lyrics but with a more self-deprecating humor that provides the LPs with their unique charm, while musically, the band demonstrates a wider range of songwriting capabilities beyond what you’d typically find in the genre, which is what could grab the attention of new and many more fans from outside the group’s close-knit DIY circle.
With the opening strums of “Fine, Great,” you get a sense of how the origin of the song and probably many others in the band’s catalogue began to find its identity – on an acoustic guitar. However, once the rest of the group comes in, you can really hear the polished leap forward in production from Sports, which may make obvious sense to some when you learn that the record was mastered by Will Yip (Title Fight, Man Overboard, etc.) and mixed by Jon Low (Restorations, Sharon Van Etten, etc.). The first half of the album certainly has its moments fueled by the group’s impressive sense of wordplay, but it’s the second half of the LP that demonstrates the signs of Modern Baseball’s possibility to reach a broader audience. “Charlie Black” is a power-pop anthem that could accidentally find its way on to modern rock mainstream radio stations (if the band decides to make a radio edit version), but the song’s transition from its ending static noise to one of the more lovelier moments on the album, “Timmy Bowers,” with its laidback guitar picking that accompanies the honest lament of “wait a minute because I’ve been living more like a piece of shit without you…”
Modern Baseball’s ability to capture the feelings of heartbreak in a poetic yet real world vernacular is what I think is the band’s strongest songwriting attribute, well, that and their earworm hooks, which will eventually snag them a larger fan base ready to immerse itself in the group’s music and sing-along to every word – a connection that most artists wish they could make with their audiences. Don’t be surprised when you find yourself doing the same. – H.M. Kauffman
