The Dream Is Over
The handover between “If This Tour Doesn't Kill You, I Will” and “DVP” is a small triumph of bad temper. PUP turn exhaustion with one another into an opening that keeps tightening until it spills into a much faster song. The playing is exact, the shouting feels barely contained, and the joke sounds close enough to a real argument to matter.
The Dream Is Over sustains that combination of skill and apparent chaos. Stefan Babcock's voice can sound frayed before a chorus has even started, but the group vocals give his complaints a larger, almost cheerful life. Steve Sladkowski's guitar lines add movement where a simpler band might rely on another heavy chord. The rhythm section makes the complicated turns feel like invitations to move.
“DVP” is an obvious peak because its speed never costs it a melody. “Sleep In The Heat” is just as effective at joining a painful subject to a chorus with immediate communal appeal. These songs make feeling terrible sound active. There is little comfort in the situations themselves, but plenty in the sense that other people are making the same noise beside you.
The heavier middle section supplies a different kind of pressure. “The Coast” lets the guitars loom, and “Old Wounds” pares the approach down to a furious hardcore outburst. After those extremes, “Can't Win” feels more predictable, and some of the later self-recrimination repeats ground the opening has already covered. The record's energy is more varied than its view of the narrator.
“Pine Point” provides a valuable final change by looking toward an abandoned town and the lives attached to it. That wider perspective gives the closing unease a different weight. The Dream Is Over works because its anger is shaped into such lively, detailed music. PUP can make a group of people sound fed up with everything while still sounding fiercely glad to be playing together.
