Camp Trash - The Long Way, The Slow Way (2022)

It's all happening fast for Camp Trash. Their 2021 EP Downtiming on emo label Count Your Lucky Stars garnered good to great reviews, the band's been on the road, appeared on the festival circuit and had tunes splashed across music websites and playlists. It's been such a rush that their ten-line official bio fails to mention any of the band members' names or the instruments they play. Based in Florida, which according to the tune "Weird Florida" they aren't too fond of, Camp Trash (music writer Keegan Bradford and his brother Levi, Bryan Gorman and Alex Roberts) play emo pop which has lineage in bands like Redd Kross, Sugar, and Blink-182, and more recently acts like Oso Oso and Saves the Day. The emo part of Camp Trash likes to navel gaze and sing self-involved, often self-critical lyrics about their emotional states and minute observations on daily life. Consider these lines from the appropriately titled "Enough Explaining": "The smell of cigarettes and wine, part of me will always find. I never asked you anything, I only assumed you understood. I'm quiet sometimes. I'm not mad, I'm quiet sometimes." Lyrically, it can all be lumped under what the band refers to in "Riley" as "Simple reckless solutions to simple problems." Several tunes, none more prominent than "Poured Out," mention cigarettes and being drunk—"I feel dumb, I feel drunk, I've got nothing going on. Just getting out of my head, got nothing left. Run away from yourself. I'll admit, I'm out of touch." Whether this is brave self-examining or egotistic oversharing depends on a definition of narcissism. The good news is that all this explaining comes in a bright, bouncy, genuinely joyful package that follows the Weezer path to wider notoriety. Big guitar chords, drums up front in the mix, and constantly ascending vocals power tunes like "Mind Yr Own," "Weird Florida," and the hookiest numbers "Lake Erie Boys" and "Church Bells." Even with the compressed, overloud recording quality, it's impossible to hate The Long Way, The Slow Way, though it's all been done before—with better melodic hooks. Nostalgic and new at the same time, it's natural to wonder, can these well-worn formulas get varied enough to find a future?