2012 was an impossibly important year for coming-of-age punk records, unstuck in time with bleeding-heart nostalgia and grappling with how to grow up, fall in love, and survive in a world where youth is fragile and the world is broken. With On the Impossible Past, the Menzingers captured those youthful insecurities and fractured lost loves through a star-spangled lens, one that both loved and felt disillusioned growing up as an American — direct references to Lions Clubs and American muscle cars and the Paupack Cliffs instilled a sense of place, tethering On the Impossible Past to a nostalgic, purely American aesthetic.
On the flip side, Hostage Calm wrote the bright-eyed Please Remain Calm, a record that sprawled both in place (“From the jungles, to the deserts, to the trenches’ reddened snow”) and in sound (few of the band’s punk contemporaries could pull off the doo-wop tinged “Patriot” with the same panache, or the sweeping “The M Word” with the same sincerity). If Please Remain Calm and On the Impossible Past were punk rock bildungsromans, 2014’s Rented World and Die on Stage dissect the same troubled world through more mature eyes. And even if Die on Stage narrows the globetrotting scope of Please Remain Calm, the effort still marks Hostage Calm’s tautest songwriting to date.
There’s nothing quite as singularly daring or genre-bending as “Patriot” or “The M Word” during Die on Stage’s half-hour runtime, but Hostage Calm still makes nods to the throwback ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll-tinged moments that splashed Please Remain Calm with vibrant shades of energy. If it wasn’t for Chris Martin’s punkish vocals and a rambunctiously upbeat tempo, “Fallen Angel” might have charted on the Billboard Charts of yesteryear, and the chorus-fakeout-to-guitar-solo that highlights album opener “When You Know” is a brilliant moment for Tom Chiari.
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