Michael Cera Palin
We Could Be Brave
BRAIN SYNTHESIZER
We Could Be Brave is, to all intents and purposes, very late. Michael Cera Palin’s debut album comes a full decade after the Atlanta emo-punk outfit first formed, but there’s good reason for that: After releasing two EPs (2015’s Growing Pains and 2018’s “I Don’t Know How to Explain It”), the band went on hiatus. When they later decided to reconvene, the pandemic hampered any meaningful progress. And so Michael Cera Palin—a beautiful and hilarious portmanteau of a band name—remained trapped in amber for a few years, caught between the past and the future, unable to operate in the present.
That time, however, served the trio very well. You can practically feel that pent-up energy finally being released across the 10 tracks that comprise We Could Be Brave. Simultaneously sophisticated yet rough around the edges, these songs are emotionally intelligent and visceral in equal measure. Opener “Feast or Famine” begins life as a gentle, noodly math-rock song, but soon shifts up a gear—and then another gear—as it speeds toward its crescendo and turns into a bona fide emo-punk song that ruminates on, among other things, stagnation and the meaning of existence.
Ironically, it’s that period of stagnation in the band’s life that seems to drive these songs. There’s a freedom and exuberance to both their genre and style that’s incredibly hard to pull off, but which they do so incredibly well. Whether that’s the erratic Dismemberment-Plan-meets-Mclusky sonic bluster of “Murder Hornet Fursona” or the graceful but emphatic confessional of “Despite,” the boisterous and spunky disaster-scene rush of “A Broken Face” or the wistfully wasted years and traumatic melancholy of “10:38/Doe,” Michael Cera Palin demonstrate that sometimes things really are worth waiting for.
That’s a point they seal with the epic 12 minutes of the title track and album closer, which lives a handful of lives in that time, shapeshifting and breaking molds left and right as it winds its way toward a climax fitting of a very special, inspiring, and exciting debut. Much better late, then, than never.
