Album Review: Million Dollars to Kill Me
By: Brianna Pulver
Tags: Million Dollars, Pop Punk, Music, Album Review, Joyce Manor

Joyce Manor used to have this rough, rugged, slammy tone to them that brought out something innately human. The music was anti-uniform; authentic. Joyce Manor started as this unapologetic, emo indie-punk band composed of four guys who crafted hurt, melodic drips. Tracks like “Falling in Love Again,” “Constant Headache,” and even “Eighteen” from Cody (2016), which wasn’t that great of an album, share lyrical symbols that almost sound drunk, like words that get stuck in the back of your throat; you start to sweat after locking eyes with that person you ran into at a party two years after they broke your heart. The albums created of that spark were brilliantly cohesive. But as of late, Joyce Manor hit a standstill. The band is recycling themes from past albums, killing the romantic idea of connective themes and instead sounding mechanical and washed-out. You can feel them losing their heart.

Joyce Manor’s self-titled LP came out in 2011, Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired in 2012, and Never Hungover Again in 2014. They were on a good run, and it seemed as though they found their sound quickly. Heavy riffs and messy plucking kept up, but it was done with intention and confidence. We figured Joyce Manor was soft punk and that it was sticking to that sad boi punk vibe already established. But when the last album Cody was released in 2016, Joyce Manor fell short. It wasn’t the same. Joyce Manor was slower, more cleaned up, more enunciated. It was a hard tug away from the usual upset noise.

With Cody, Joyce Manor acquired a new drummer — not a huge deal, but it definitely changed the way members played together. What ruined Joyce Manor was Rob Schnapf. He was the producer for Cody, who’s also produced artists like Elliot Smith and Dr. Dog. Schnapf is a big shot in the industry (not always a good thing), but even with all the experience he’s had with seriously talented musicians, he didn’t trust that Joyce Manor could succeed in their normal disorderly, manic rage. Schnapf broke them, forced them down to think and tweak and change so many components that what we ended up hearing wasn’t Joyce Manor anymore. It was Schnapf. Cody was received well publicly, but for fans who have been around, it was disappointing. To put it plainly, it was boring.

Having an organized, systematic way of doing things is great. This isn’t a dig at how Schnapf produces. It’s a dig the assumption that everyone works better under the same circumstances; for believing you can blanketly claim that music has a one-way system for producing “good quality” songs and albums. Joyce Manor isn’t clean. It isn’t pop.

While Schnapf fell short with producing Cody, it was actually Converge’s guitarist, Kurt Ballou, who produced Million Dollars to Kill Me, and something is still off with Joyce Manor. For Ballou, a well-known artist in the metalcore community with romantic lyricism, to produce something as immature as Million Dollars to Kill Me is disheartening. Million Dollars is monotone, sappy, and self-deprecating. There’s a shift in strumming pattern or drum stroke every two or three songs, but the album is trash.

Their second song “Think I’m Still in Love with You” may be the worst version of this song I could have anticipated. It’s poppy and upbeat and it sort of reminds me of a bad prom movie from the 80s. If nothing more, it’s redundant with lines like “Doesn’t really make a difference to me / Take a bunch of pills and crash into me / Do it again for old time sake / Look at me now there’s nothing else left to break” There’s similarities and callbacks to the lyrics in “Falling in Love Again” from Never Hungover Again, but the execution of “Falling in Love Again” reveals so much more depth: “Thanks for showing me around last night / Hope you don’t think I don’t care / Cause I do I just don’t know if I should feel this bad about you / after finishing your birthday drugs look at a yearbook unprepared / And betray yourself to sleep it off /

Then come down to collect it” On top of their lacking lyricism and less than exciting instrumentals, it’s an eight-track, 22-minute album. It’s like if surf-rock smacked heads with the lyrics of Morrissey and spat out an album. Million Dollars to Kill Me doesn’t work, and further, it’s depressing coming from a band that used to have as much heart as Joyce Manor began with.