Modern Baseball
You’re Gonna Miss It All (10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)
RUN FOR COVER
When Jake Ewald, Brendan Lukens, Ian Farmer, and Sean Huber halted output as the too-convivial-for-emo Modern Baseball in 2017 after only six years and three albums of being so (and successfully so), the bro-fi quartet alarmed fans with their call for mental health and a desire for emotional growth away from the spotlight. With that, fresh-faced singers/guitarists Ewald and Lukens, bassist Farmer, and drummer Huber put aside MB’s brand of earnest, pop-hardcore music and romantic, humorous, and unusually self-aware lyricism and quietly rolled into the adulthood they wrote about yearningly—and played loudly, yet with great nuance—since high school.
That wise-beyond-its-tears vibe was most prevalent on Modern Baseball’s second album, You're Gonna Miss It All, and its most acerbic track, “Your Graduation.” Now, in honor of the tenth anniversary it celebrated back in February, its label Run for Cover is reissuing the minor-case classic with an added 7-inch of demos. The 45’s slightly rawer versions of “Pothole” and “Rock Bottom” are a great get for fans, though even better is the 96-page booklet of never-before-published photos of the quartet at work and at play.
Extras aside, the main reason for getting hold of YBMIA10, now, is that most non-emo-listening audiences missed out on Ewald and Lukens’ prowess as contagiously catchy composers with a yen for smartly told vulnerability the first time around. This Difford & Tilbrook of the 21st century get to the guts of messy relationships and disillusion-filled futures fast on “Fine, Great” and “Apartment,” and find their youths swilling around the bottom of the glasses that are “Notes” and “The Old Gospel Choir”—all accompanied by subtly touching harmonies and bracingly inventive yet simplistic musicianship.
At a time when Weezer’s Blue Album is getting the box set/sci-fi tour treatment, its subdued, lit-witty brother You’re Gonna Miss It All deserves equal attention, and yet another inning for Modern Baseball.
