Say Anything - ...Is Committed
Say Anything
…Is Committed
Release Date: May 24th, 2024
Label: Dine Alone
Review by Jared Stossel
If you’ve ever listened to a Say Anything record over the last two decades, you know that Max Bemis is one of the most unique songwriters and composers that the scene has given birth to. Weaving between therapy sessions, melodramatic declarations of love, scathing commentary on the world, and meditations on religion and sex (usually within the same song), Bemis has carved out a unique niche for himself in a scene that can feel rather homogeneous.
Theoretically, Say Anything was brought to a dramatic conclusion with 2019’s brilliant pseudo-concept album Oliver Appropriate, a bookend sequel-in-spirit to the band’s 2004 juggernaut …Is A Real Boy. The condemnation of the self-righteous, the vile, the damned was done! Bemis and his longtime wife, Sherri Dupree-Bemis, rode off into the sunset and retired to a town in Texas to raise their five children. So the story goes. Four years later, Say Anything has returned to the forefront with …Is Committed, a twelve-track hour-long exploration of loss, betrayal, and love; namely, everything that a Say Anything record encompasses. It’s not as focused of an effort or as grand in scale as something like …Is A Real Boy or In Defense of the Genre, but the objective remains the same as any of their past records: …Is Committed is part verbal decimation, part therapy session for recapping the events of the tumultuous last few years.
From the moment that he screams “Fuck breathing, let’s die alone” in the opening track “Be, Children (Introduction To The Reunion Record)”, it’s clear that Bemis is out for blood. There’s something in the way that he delivers his lines, whether he’s saying something rather prophetic or delivering one of the weirdest combinations of words in the English language, that makes him stand out amongst his peers.
Bemis vacillates between thoughts of anger, depression, happiness, and being so horny that he writes an entire song about wanting to literally be his wife’s sex toy (“I, Vibrator”). There are more references to bodily fluids (namely, cum) throughout the twelve tracks of …Is Committed than anything I’ve ever heard on a Blink-182 record. There are plenty of oddball moments like “We Say Grace In This Goddamn Band, Mister”, which finds Bemis opening with the line “My dick is graceful” as AutoTune is gently layered over the recording before launching into an almost hip-hop-influenced account of his personal life and an indictment of the Texas town he and his wife have been raising their children in. It hearkens back to the band’s 2016 entry I Don’t Think It Is, one of the band’s most experimental entries, which found him collaborating with producer and brother-in-law Darren King. However, I don’t think they’ll be working together anytime soon, as Bemis name checks him at the end of “Psyche”, going so far as telling the listener to “Google him”.
Songs like “On Cum” and “Psyche” feel like the band we’ve come to know and love since the early aughts, with a raging energy and self-deprecating lyrics, accentuated by the fierce percussion of drummer Coby Linder, while other tracks deal with issues of mental health (“Are You (In) There?”), religion (“Say Anything, Collectively, Made Love To Your God”) and familial strife (“Carrie & Lowell & Cody (Pendent)”).
The penultimate track, “Woman Song”, is heartwrenching, with Bemis in tears as he all of his problems (both self-inflicted and out of his control), come to a head. This may be the most vulnerable that Bemis has ever gotten on a song in the over two decades that the project has been in operation. This moment is bracketed by a skit that finds Max Bemis chatting with a friend about the concluding track to the album, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the importance that bands put on the epic finales of their albums,. Consequentially, this leads into the nearly nine-minute epilogue, “Fan Fiction”.
Even with its brighter moments, …Is Committed can be a dour listen as Bemis plunges into the depths of his psyche in ways he never has before. The results can be mixed, and not everyone is going to like this one, but there’s no denying that it’s a bold entry in the Say Anything catalog, and it still evokes the same band that fans have come to know and embrace since 2004.
