QUARTERBOY - By QUARTERBACKS
ALBUM TITLE: QUARTERBOY
ARTIST: QUARTERBACKS
GENRE: Lo-fi / Twee / Punk
LISTEN HERE: Bandcamp
Despite loving everything that QUARTERBACKS produces, I can unbiasedly say that QUARTERBOY is utterly exceptional. It all began when I was mindlessly browsing Bandcamp and somehow stumbled upon their albums. Although you should never judge an album by its cover, it was definitely what drew me to it first. It depicts a boy with a leaf on his head -- it’s goofy and simple, and the green and leafy background is vaguely reminiscent of summer monsoons in Northeastern suburbs. After listening to their songs over and over and reading some interviews, I somehow fell in love with this little band from nowhere.
The weird thing about QUARTERBACKS is that by all accounts, it should not be a successful band. Not only do they not care about popularity, they actively shun it. In one interview, Dean Engle, the front man of the band, says, “We’re not career musicians. This band will fade away.” Engle’s voice isn’t incredible -- it’s surely charming, but it’s hoarse and muttered. Most of the songs on QUARTERBOY barely last a minute. But by embracing their impermanence, the band manages to capture an ephemeral reality, and from it emerges a hyper-realistic point of view on small town life. And that’s what QUARTERBOY is about.
If QUARTERBOY can be considered anything, it is important to make note that it’s more of a demo display than an actual polished album. At first, the songs are slow and lonely and hopeful, before they are suddenly played as quickly as they could be. In another interview, QUARTERBACKS says they found their sound when playing for a group of punk kids, and the band “didn’t know if they’d like our wussy music....we played as hard and fast as we could. It stuck.” But while their final album, the self-titled QUARTERBACKS-EP is reflective of that decision, QUARTERBOY is anything but.
The songs are quiet and a bit sad, but still kind and gentle. Mostly, QUARTERBOY just consists of Engle’s gentle voice croaking out some brutally honest lyrics, either about girls, or his town, or his parents. It’s semi-electric, semi-acoustic, with ambient echoes and a really simple drum beat.
In one of my favorite songs, “Weekend”, Engle sings, “I kind of hate the town where I live, but as soon as I leave I start to miss it.”
“There’s such relief in coincidence. A universe that finally works how you always suspected, with yourself in the center,” he sings in “Center”. “As I get older, I recognize that love is mostly situational.”
He ends “Pool” with, “One time I showed you a song. You only thought that it was kind of good. I never played it again, it wasn’t even about you.”
Somehow, the album perfectly captures the ambling laziness and easy boredom of small suburbs. Listening to QUARTERBOY feels exactly like high school, watching Freaks and Geeks, and that sharp stabbing pain in your chest when you think back to those times. It feels good, but it hurts at the same time.
Listen to QUARTERBOY below: