Where Your Heartache Exists: 10 Years of 'Rented World'
The Menzingers released 'Rented World' 10 years ago today.
No one is really ever 100% ahead of the curve. Things always fly under our radar, and we can occasionally get to them a little after everyone else. Case-in-point, I wasn’t aware of The Menzingers when they released the album that launched them into the stratosphere: On The Impossible Past. Instead, I hopped on the Scranton band’s train when they released their follow-up: 2014’s Rented World.
Formed in 2006, The Menzingers’ success is a testimony to their drive for reinvention. The band was the product of the bands Bob and the Sagets and Kos Mos ending. The band released their first album A Lesson in the Abuse of Information Technology in 2007. It’s solid, and you can hear a little bit of what the band would go into in later releases, but it’s more abrasive. While some of the songs show their potential, it’s not really as memorable, and those songs have not been staples of the band’s set. In 2010, the band released Chamberlain Waits, which really begins to feel like the start of their discography. The hard-drinking self-deprecation on “Rivalries,” the romanticism of a missed chance at love on “Time Tables,” and the disenchantment with home and growing up show on “Tasker-Morris Station” and “I Was Born.” These are all tropes that the Menzos would revisit in later releases, and set the tone for their future records.
In 2012, the band released On The Impossible Past, which to some extent has become the band’s calling card ever since. The band’s setlists are still filled with cuts from the album, and it has many of the group’s most beloved songs. In 2022, the band released a deluxe edition of the album with the acoustic demos that had circulated in fan circles, dubbed On The Possible Past. OTIP has remained one of the most popular punk records to come out of that era. It was long celebrated for a long time before the anniversary circuit rolled around. For people who may not have been familiar with the band before, this was the entry point for many. Except for me.
In 2014, I was a sophomore in college, having just obtained a fake ID and having broken up with the girl that I had dated through high school, I was ready to party. With a class schedule that mostly began later in the day and had a few days off, I was primed for a semester of nights out, flirting, and drinking. I wasn’t good at most of those things. In those pursuits of boozy nights, sex, and other hedonistic desires, my friends and I would throw the word “asshole” around to describe one another, and we would wear it like a badge of honor.
At the time, my daily website checks also included the now-defunct Property of Zack, one of the beacons for exciting bands coming out of the alternative music scene. The bands that I’d fallen in love with through tumblr throughout the end of high school and beginning of college all got coverage on POZ: The Wonder Years, Modern Baseball, and Man Overboard. Plus, they covered the legacy acts that I was continually falling back in love with: Fall Out Boy, Green Day, Brand New, etc.
In March 2014, I had messed things up with a girl I liked from drinking too much. My closest drinking buddy wasn’t attending school that semester, and I was wallowing in feeling too much like an asshole. I logged onto Property of Zack, and saw that a band I hadn’t heard of had just released a new song called “I Don’t Wanna Be An Asshole Anymore.”
As someone who had recently decided that he didn’t want to be an asshole anymore, I was immediately drawn to the title. As the anthemic guitars hit, I was pretty much hooked from the get go. Greg Barnett singing about how he wasn’t acting like himself on Friday night, stumbling out the door, and “wandering nightly through the garden of your heartache,” a chord was struck. Then, the chorus hit. “But I don’t wanna be an asshole anymore,” he says as a chord fades out, before a series of “woahs” swell, along with his promise that “baby, I’ll be good to you.”
I wish I could say that this was a come-to-god moment, where I realized the error of my ways. I vowed to sober up, get my life together, and cease my asshole ways, but I was 19. I had plenty more years of beating myself up and not caring if I’d hurt anyone in the process ahead of me. Still, anytime I’ve seen the Menzingers in the past 10 years, the vow to not want to be an asshole anymore has rang true as I’ve screamed, “It feels damn good just to bleed sometimes.”
While The Menzingers have continued to show their growth and maturation, especially on the follow-up album After The Party, Rented World is much more of a self-examination rather than moments where they may have looked at the issues in the larger world on earlier songs like “Freedom Bridge” or the later tune “America (You’re Freaking Me Out).” Songs about paranoia (“Bad Things”) or quitting smoking (“The Talk”) pepper the way with further examinations of discontent and discomfort.
Even though later Menzingers records have seen the band searching for a sense of belonging in the larger world (or lack thereof) or a comfort with age, Rented World lands in a strange sweet spot of an acceptance that sometimes things just aren’t going to feel right. Those are perhaps best illustrated on “Rodent” and “Nothing Feels Good Anymore.” The former a poetic musing on relating to a mouse trapped in the walls and the latter a full-throated expression of discontent.
In the closing track, Barnett sings, “I cannot help but fear the things that I can’t control/The Things I’ll never know,” and that does feel like the mission statement to the album. Just as I didn’t completely make my amends to no longer be an asshole right away, there’s still a lot of fear and unsureness throughout Rented World. On “Rodent,” he confesses, ‘In the bars where I live, lives someone who I would’ve hated when I was young,” before he starts seeing parallels between himself and the mouse that he can’t find the “guts” to call an exterminator on. “I have only bad news for you,” he concedes in the song’s anthemic outro.
On “Nothing Feels Good Anymore,” there’s this sense of living in the misery, and even though it’s a feeling capable of being moved past, when you’re in it, it does feel like it may never end. It’s a breakup song and a plea to brought back, but it’s really a much more stark description of depression. Even as you try to escape it “at the party in a cloud of nicotine, exhaled by drunk twenty-somethings,” it’s still there lingering, and Barnett conjures up one of the best images on the album:
Like the dead cat in the alley
Like the garbage overturned
Like the uninviting orgy
On top of some dogshit in the yard
As the song ends, there’s a sense of acceptance that things just don’t always pan out the way you planned, and as sad as it is, you do just need to accept it. “I had a life, I thought I had it together. I thought my house could never burn, but that was before,” he screams before the final chorus.
Other than “I Don’t Wanna Be an Asshole Anymore,” the other song that has had the longest lasting impact on The Menzingers’ from Rented World is “In Remission.” Similarly anthemic, it feels like a closer encapsulation to the album’s dire message that little feels good, and there’s a lot to fear. The track starts with having a winning lotto ticket with a vow to cash it someday. In true Menzos fashion, the issues get drowned out with booze and reckless abandon.
Maybe the future’s just a little bit weird
Maybe the God you love is all I gotta fear
Life’s a terminal illness in remission
So I took the weight of it all out for a drink
And then we drove back drunk
Through the busy city streets
Even though the tone is triumphant and roaring, the album ends with the refrain, “If everyone needs a crutch, then I need a wheelchair,” a reminder that even though it may be normal to need a little help, it sometimes feels like the shit you’re going through is entirely debilitating.
The album ultimately closes on a solemn note with the acoustic memorial song “When You Died.” While it’s a meditation on loss, it also lives in the same sort of dark place that the rest of the record does. There’s a hope to bring back those who have been lost, but a fear and a questioning about why they’re gone. Ultimately, there’s no answers, just a resolve that sometimes we need to live in the discomfort.
In the decade since Rented World was dropped, The Menzingers have only grown into a larger outfit. The band got a wave of positive press surrounding their 2017 album After The Party, which saw them reach beyond the scene to larger, more mainstream press coverage. It’s a record that truly rivals On The Impossible Past.
The tunes have also seemingly gotten a little bit brighter. After The Party has nostalgia for the past, while growing ever more comfortable in the present, settling into a more mature adulthood and growing to be a better partner. The band’s next two albums saw them grow further in that direction. While there are still meditations on loss and hard-drinking tunes here and there, they sound more adjusted to the world they’re living in. Even though sometimes it does feel like the darkness is going to go on forever, it may eventually tide for some brief moments.