The Energy – When We Were Young

After releasing four studio albums over the past decade, Brooklyn rock quartet The Energy released their fifth studio album When We Were Young (2016) last month. As the album’s title track (‘Our lives had just begun/ When we were young’) suggests, retro-gazing nostalgia is a prominent theme that recurs throughout the album’s ten tracks:

“Since this is our fifth album, it seemed fitting that the album would be a type of personal retrospective for us- looking back on how far we’ve come in our lives and remembering where we came from […I think we felt that we wanted to remember things on this album- to go forward by looking backwards- remembering how we felt about the world, who our girlfriends were, who our parents were, what the world meant to us, etc. […] Just felt important to connect the “now” with the “then”.”

The Energy largely sticks to the sonic template and lyrical themes that characterize ‘old-school’ rock, many of the songs are characterized by angst, frustration and the need for self-definition, personal authenticity and freedom. With energetic guitar riffs, dynamic chord progressions, occasional melodies and the occasionally catchy chorus (e.g. ‘I don’t need no indecision/ Take now for what I am/ I don’t like your disposition/ Please don’t call me superman’ on “You Can Follow”), the album has many tracks that are likely to appeal to fans of punchy, simple rock songs with a decidedly optimist bent.

Vocalist Adam Wolfsdorf’s skilfully alternates between loud, angst-ridden, crowd-rousing choruses and plaintive, sombre introspective verses on tracks like “When We Were Young” – before taking on a more intimate, sensitive tone on the soft-rock, unabashedly romantic “Return to You”: ‘Will you wait for me tomorrow?/ Will you wait for me once more?’

While the album’s sonic reliance on traditional rock arrangements and soaring choruses begins to sound repetitive halfway through, interesting lyrical twists – such as the biblical references in the verses of “Free” and the use of a second person point of view in “American Disaster” – helps make some of the tracks distinguish themselves from each other. While “Don’t Come Around” sounds like it could have been recorded 20 years ago, “American Disaster” is decidedly more emphatic and reminiscent of 2000s rock, sounding like a cross between Simple Plan and Green Day as it sketches a portrait of an adolescent underdog: ‘She left you/ You’re on your own/ You wonder, you’re far from her/ You flounder/ While he pounds her …You’re filled with violence/ And nobody knows’.

“The Constant” takes The Energy closer to the present, with a ‘message rap’ feature by Brooklyn-based Albanian rapper G4SHI (also known as The Kid Gashi): ‘God is my constant/ […] I’m from a city where it’s hard to see the stars/ And where police be the reason why most of my friends is gone’. The angst, anger and frustration takes a back seat with the song’s closing track, “Little Man (Dax’s Song)”: an intimate, paternal ballad that projects faith, hope and optimism onto the next generation.

I-TUNES: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/when-we-were-young/id1104692098

The Energy – “When We Were Young”

YOU TUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCswB0b79No

The Energy, VENTS Magazine

Review by Cyrus Rhodes