PUP have perfected the art of transubstantiating the hydra of self-doubt into art. And with their fourth LP, The Unraveling of PUPTHEBAND, they’ve assembled a record that, much like the wildly cross-sectioned cranium on the album’s cover, peels back the curtain more than ever on the band as a unit. It finds singer and guitarist Stefan Babcock pondering publicly exactly where he and his three bandmates have ended up, both individually and as a unit, in their decade-plus career.
Both the album and the band’s current live show – as seen at a packed-to-the-gills House of Blues in Boston – begin somewhat surprisingly, with Babcock solo on the piano. Unraveling features a few interludes all titled ‘Four Chords’ that get exponentially shorter as the album goes on – the first a proper song, the others more scattered thoughts. This intro is a red herring of sorts, as he plods through the four groups of notes that typically comprise radio-ready music, growing more lyrically defiant until the song explodes into a cacophony of guitar and synth and trumpet. The Korg Babcock’s using is quickly hurried offstage for its own protection; what follows is one of the best songs the band has ever written, ‘Totally Fine’. It sets the tone for the album, Babcock entertaining the idea of impending doom and then realizing that he can’t tell which side of the emotional spectrum he’s on, like a Schrödinger’s PUP [sorry] of psychological wellbeing.
From the moment Babcock ditches the keys, the entire room is in a frenzy. Not more than ten seconds of music pass during the whole night without someone crowd-surfing into the waiting arms of security, who use the infrequent instrument-swapping breaks to pass out free water bottles into the crowd. The exact center of the House of Blues gives way to a circle, and veterans of the myriad collisions there get lifted up to sail towards the barrier. After a while, a couple of those smiling faces held aloft become usual suspects, including one held in the air – and remarkably still – for quite some time. One patron on the left side of the house puts it quite succinctly: “This is how we do it in Boston on a Tuesday, baby!” Onstage is almost as animated as those frothing front rows – Babcock and bassist Nestor Chumak are constantly jumping themselves airborne during the thrilling instrumental passages of each song, and PUP have mastered the art of building their songs to those blood-pumping bridges and conclusions.
The confrontational one-two punch of ‘My Life Is Over and I Couldn’t Be Happier’ and ‘Guilt Trip’ gives way to the recent single ‘Robot Writes a Love Song’, wherein the narrator feels as an inept and debilitated by, an emotion that he gives out under stress. The touchstone of a poetry-inclined robot might be a nod to Grandaddy’s Jeddy-3 character, who died a similarly catastrophic death on The Sophtware Slump; PUP covered that band’s ‘A.M. 180’ for the fantastically-named This Place Sucks Ass, the precursor EP to Unraveling. The whole night is high-octane, energetic, and absurd – including a segment where ‘Matilda’ sees Babcock donning patently ridiculous sunglasses and “dueling” with guitarist Steve Sladkowski as they pace back and forth in lockstep trading off classic Eagles licks.
But for all the raw energy and antics that ensue both on- and off-stage, PUP wouldn’t be the excellent band it is without the burgeoning emotional heart at the center of their songs. That core intensity of feeling powers the music, and the kids tumbling head-over-heels through the air, as much as the guitarists’ riffs, Chumak’s thrumming bass, or Zack Mykuka’s frantic drumming. You’re as like to cry as mosh during ‘Sleep in the Heat’, where Babcock recounts the tale of his beloved chameleon, whom he finds departed, probably under her heat lamp, upon returning home. As any pet lover would, he spent nearly every cent he had on her care, but tragically it couldn’t remedy her. While a frequent theme in PUP’s music is the difficulty of navigating relationships and life at large, often in some degree of drunken stupor, ‘Sleep’ finds Babcock at the peak of vulnerability and grief. While claiming to know much about someone from their music is typically little more than parasocial folly, he doesn’t do much to refute the typical Canadian stereotype of being extremely considerate, helping reunite a fan with a lost phone passed to the front during the chaos, and later on making sure to implore the audience to take care of each other and thank security for their help, just as he did last time around.
His most earnest moment, though, comes as he introduces Unraveling closer ‘PUPTHEBAND, Ltd. is Filing for Bankruptcy’. As in ‘Totally Fine’, Babcock oscillates between extremes, acknowledging the band’s success but never feeling secure in it, struggling with the unknowable future of someone in their 30s – the quartet are likely to graduate to huge arenas next; but a few unpredictable turns and they could all be selling insurance instead of working another album cycle two years hence. But he says it plainly in the preamble to the crowd: “I’ve never been so happy since starting this band.” It shows – even seventeen songs into the night Babcock is as stoked as ever, leaping about the place as the song is one of the few which afford him the opportunity to ditch his guitar for a bit. The band fakes an encore break by “hiding” behind their instruments, and close with ‘Kids’. The Morbid Stuff cut encapsulates the feeling that broadly underpins all of PUP’s music – the way sometimes you need a hand to claw your way out from nihilism. And while the song details what seems to be a romantic relationship, it’s hard not to feel like everyone in the room has been doing some of that upward-lifting on behalf of one another – perhaps even literally – over the past ninety minutes.
Review and Photos by Collin Heroux
