Old Best Friend –Living Alone

You’re a cool guy. You’ve got your pure bred poodle, your hand knitted alpaca sweater. You enjoy drinking imported organically grown coffee that was hand picked by the alpacas that you shaved to knit that ugly sweater, as you sit at local cafes whilst discussing all the amazing novels by people with far more interesting lives than yours on your shelf you’ve never bloody read.

“Hmmm yes, I would have to say that out of all the novels I have never read, Hemingway would have to be my favourite. Followed in close second by either Dickens, Woolf or Edith Wharton, you’ve probably never heard of her”.

You’re looking for that emotionally detached girl. The one who’s amazingly forced responses of “Ch’yeah” and “I guess so” really reinforce the prefix of “literally” that usually precedes them. She’s got that Aubery Plaza vibe about her. She’s so utterly boring and predictable in her diversity that she just makes you want to fucking puke right on her ironic glasses. But, there is one problem…

Who’s YouTube clips are you going to send to each other as you sit on the greyhound bus from New York to Denver because you think talking to each other in public has become too fucking mainstream?

Well, never fear! I’ve sifted through your outstandingly boring Mp3 collection and found something before it becomes cool. Good on you for having it!

Living Alone, the new album from Old Best Friend. A band out of Brooklyn run by a Brooklynite called Mike Comite. According to his bandcamp page “the album is about living alone… and it sounds like living alone.”

I’ve lived alone. It was a lot more fucking exciting than this.

The album is well recorded and decently performed but it fails to engage me on any level. It falls into that space between the couch and all the wall, where my dog hides all my socks. I know they are there, but I’d rather someone else enjoy it and not bother me about it or try and tell me that I should pick it up. I simply cannot relate to it musically or lyrically.

Personally, I really just can’t connect with any of it. The overly American accent that just passes for singing really irritates me. It’s like someone took My Chemical Romance, sucked all the fun and sarcasm out, injected a huge dose Ritalin and pressed it all onto a cassette tape ready to sell out of a broken Gibson case on a street corner in Soho. Oh, but only when it rains because you don’t wanna get too popular.

None of the music excites me into a feeling of passion, and lyrically, I honestly don’t care: It washed over me.
It’s all a bit too emotionally disjointed. I mean, how many girls does this guy date then break up with just to get a song? I know Taylor Swift is cool to hate and the hipsters are totally going to oppose the mainstream so they’ve adopted her but do you need to rip off her lifestyle and song writing process too?

“I mean, like, literally I LOVE Tayay and, like, I swear to “Ch’yeah” like god I am as literally like as original as her”.

There’s a band from Naples, Florida called Fake Problems. Amazing. Great band in fact. A lot of this material sounds like a half arsed attempt imitate them. I have no idea if that is what Mike was going for, nor do I know if he likes good music.

There’s a lyric on the last track “By the time I got back to the living room you had removed all your clothes”. If you wrote and/or performed music like this where I hang out, no one would be coming back to your living room and they certainly would not be taking off their clothes for you.

The song is called “Now I Don’t” and actually has my favourite moment on the entire record. No, it’s not that it means the whole ordeal is over! It actually gets passionate for the last 4 seconds. It’s like I waited my entire life, or maybe an entire record, to hear this! A final outburst of excitement and the feeling of a lyric that isn’t sung or written from some forced sense that everything the author says HAS to be ironic.

There’s some good musicianship, I wont deny that Mike does have some talent there. The guitar solo on “Divide Your Sleep” is rather pretty and throughout he displays a knack for the instrument.

Maybe if this fell on to another reviewer’s desk it would get a more positive review than what I have given it. However, I have to work with what I am given and as a man named Mick once said: “You can’t always get what you want”. So, instead of the exciting, emotionally engaging and boundary defying album I always hope to hear when I get sent something, I was left with a sour lick of a disaffected Brooklyn boy and the after taste of his failure to relate to other human beings. If this album was a restaurant I would punch the chef right in the dick.

Am I missing the point of this album? Probably.

Ah! Here are 5 chefs getting punched in the dick for my Old Best Friend!