Sloppy Meateaters, Conditioned by the Laugh Track

On Conditioned by the Laugh Track, Sloppy Meateaters feel like a band that’s trying to rip their way out of their own collective skin. At their core, they’re a Warped Tour-playing pop-punk band that shares the stage with the second-string Blink-182s of the world, but with this album, they seem to be waging some kind of internal battle over what they really want to be as a band. Are they punk? Are they good ol’ boys from the wilds of Georgia? Are they dark, mysterious atmospheric rockers? I don’t know, and I get the feeling that the Meateaters themselves don’t, either.

On songs like “Stop (Snake Mountain),” that internal struggle comes to the fore. For about half the song, the band mines a countrified rawk groove, but halfway through they switch gears and turn it into a full-on hardcore blast…only to stop a second time and dive into a droney, sung-spoken meditation on the nature of existence. Hell, it’s like three songs packed into one, with no real clue as to which one they’re really aiming for. “The Ballad of Boo Radley (Unwavering Band of Light)” does something similar, again starting off with a stop-start, backwoods kind of country-rock thing but then slowing down at the halfway mark and mutating into a sinister, Jesus & Mary Chain-esque head-nodding groove (which, incidentally, beats the heck out of most what’s come before by that point).

The bad part, unfortunately, is that the mixing and matching of styles doesn’t always work. When the band changes things up, it’s not the most natural shift, but is instead fairly jarring — in a few spots, the song stops completely, so much so that I have to check to see if I’ve gone to a different track entirely. Worse still, sometimes it seems like the band’s just doing it so they can say they can, not for any reason related to the song. At the end of “Lusting Heavy (Castle Greyskull),” for example, the heavy rock guitars fade out, there’s a few seconds of utter silence, and then a delicate, pretty acoustic guitar plays for a few more bars. And why? The song, for all intents and purposes, is done — why prolong it with something completely unlike the rest of the song, especially after creating such a solid, “finished”-sounding ending?

Given that problem, it’s hard for me to say what Sloppy Meateaters should do. I enjoy the dark, death-obsessed Alkaline Trio-isms of songs like “Run Mary Run,” “Alone and Wicked,” “Lusting Heavy,” and “Daywalker” (one of the highlights), and the Far-meets-Jets to Brazil rock of “Truth in Rations” is absolutely the perfect way to close out the album, but at the same time it’s nice to see them trying to incorporate different elements and distinguish themselves from relatively generic pop-punk bands like some of their Warped cohorts and labelmates. Whatever they do, I think they’re going to have to either pick something and stick with it — whether it’s pop-punk or country-rock or whatever — or work harder at integrating all the different elements they’re trying to use more seamlessly. Up to you, guys.