Charles Rogers, "High Concept"

You go to a "punk" show in the Midwest. The singer gets on stage and slyly asks the crowd, "Are you ready to get sad?" and launches into a set full of self-absorbed songs that wallow in the refuse of a high school love life. Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Charles Rogers collectively roll their eyes and head for the door.

The days of waxing poetic are over. It's time to suck it up, get over it, and figure it out. It's time for High Concept.

After releasing EP after EP and setting the Guinness World Record for Most House Shows Played in the Grand Rapids Area, you might have wondered if Charles Rogers were ever going to release their debut full-length album. Well don't you look ridiculous now, because High Concept is packed with eight full-length songs in a full-length package.

I won't waste time on "Appeal" and "Big Fun," the album's singles. Not because they're bad songs, but because I'm sure they've been tattooed on your brain since they were released. And with Jack Cawthon's liquid jaw-breaking guitars and vocals and Sutton Andrews' bone-shattering basslines that thud in between Dougan Church's spastically deliberate drums, you'd have to be living in a cave to pass up these singles. But where High Concept really shines is lyrically.

To say the lyrics on High Concept are relatable is an understatement. They're more than relatable, they're thoughts that have been kicking around your head for the last few years of your life. And just as they started to materialize in your brain, Charles Rogers beats you to the punch and puts all of them on a record.

Is everything binary? Can it all be split into "good" and "bad"? Charles Rogers doesn't know either and that's what makes "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" so appealing. Cawthon belts out the line, "this is water, and this is trash/and I'm trying to split the gap," unabashedly parsing the boundaries between right and wrong, giving and taking while simultaneously revealing an incestuous relationship between the two.

Cawthon sings, "better put passing judgment on the cover of your resume," before asking, "is anybody keeping score?" and accepts that the world isn't black and white, that transactions within any relationship just lead to a deserving sense of expectation that always ends up being self-defeating.

Charles Rogers wrangle with grief in "50 Push Ups" when Cawthon growls, "do you think that it's wrong to talk about it so much?/we've got nothing new to say," exhausting over constant self-temperature-taking and metal reassessment.

Appalled by onlookers expecting grief to be insultingly digestible, Cawthon sings, "they need a measurement, to compare you with/don't you feel their eyes on the back of your head?"

I could go on and dissect every song, but that's where the fun is, and besides, that's your job.

Charles Rogers are the band we need right now. Heavy and engaging without sacrificing intelligence, introspective without wasting time self-obsessively waxing poetic. On High Concept, Charles Rogers talks about emotion in a way that avoids the cyclical, roundabout path that a lot of music takes us on. Charles Rogers avoids lateral change and substitutes in upward growth instead.

So, no, I'm not "ready to get sad," and neither are Charles Rogers. I'm ready for an album with monolithic guitars, paint-peeling bass, drums that sound like they were recorded in the Titanic, and sprouting, sprawling lyrics that Don DeLillo only wishes he wrote. I'm ready for High Concept and so are you.