I Am the Avalanche Release The Horror Show

I Am the Avalanche - The Horror Show (Equal Vision Records)

★★★★☆

There's a version of this review where I tell you to just go listen to the record. That version is probably the correct one. But here we are, so let me try to explain why The Horror Show hit me the way it did, which is to say: hard, and somewhere in the chest, and more than once on a Tuesday morning when I had no business feeling anything at all.

Twenty-two years in. Think about that. Vinnie Caruana has been doing this since The Movielife were the best band on Long Island, and somewhere along the way I Am the Avalanche became one of those bands you just trust, the kind where you don't even listen to the single before buying the record because you already know where they're coming from.

The Horror Show is their fifth full-length and first in six years, out now on Equal Vision, and if there's any justice in the universe it's the one that finally breaks them to a wider audience. Though knowing this scene, the people who need it most have already been listening on repeat since April.

The context matters here: about 75% of the lyrics were written after Caruana's best friend passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. That kind of loss will either shut a person down completely or blow every creative constraint wide open. For Vinnie, it did the latter. The album spans all these different eras and was written in so many different locations around the United States, and somehow that scattered geography shows up in the music, it feels restless in the best way, like a record made by someone who couldn't stay still long enough to second-guess themselves.

Brett "The Ratt" Romnes produced, engineered, and mixed the whole thing at Barbershop Studios, a converted 19th century church on the shore of Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey with the band coming back across ten separate sessions. That process shows. This doesn't sound like a record knocked out in a week. It sounds like a band that kept returning to something they weren't done with yet.

This is the most ambitious IATA record. Caruana has cited Seaweed, Descendents, No Use for a Name, the Beatles, Jawbreaker, and Lagwagon as reference points, and yeah, you can hear all of it in there, the melodic crunch and the earnestness and the sense that big emotions deserve big hooks to carry them. "God's Travel Plans" opens the record with an eerie quiet before "The Horror Show" kicks the door in.

"Laughing and Bleeding" is the one you're going to want to scream into the back half of a van ride somewhere on a Wednesday. The band describes it as a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit and the bonds that keep us grounded which sounds like press copy until you actually hear it, and then it sounds like the truest thing anyone's said about friendship in a punk song in years.

"I Miss California and Every Dog I've Ever Met" is exactly what it sounds like and is also absolutely devastating. "5:55" is fragile in a way that IATA hasn't really let themselves be before. "True Legends Never Die" is the closest thing to a pit-starter on the record, and "Alive on 14th Street" closes things with that shimmery warmth that reminds you this band still knows how to write a melody that gets under your skin and stays there.

Historically masters of the two-minute punk song, this time they dive deeper, and the result is their most expansive and textural record yet. That depth never comes at the expense of urgency. This doesn't meander. Every song earns its runtime.

What makes The Horror Show something beyond a solid punk record is the same thing that made Avalanche United matter, or Wolverines it's the specificity. Caruana doesn't write about grief in the abstract. He writes about a specific person, a specific loss, a specific night, a specific feeling at 5:55 in the morning. He hopes this record can become a guide for anyone experiencing loss, with the message being: you are stronger than you think you are, and you are not alone. That's not a tagline. That's the whole album.

The orgcore complaint about IATA has always been that they're underrated, that if they came up in a different city or ran in different circles they'd be on festival headliner posters by now. Twenty-two years in, I'm less interested in that argument than I used to be. The people who find this record are going to find it, and it's going to mean something to them, and they're going to bring it to shows and sing it back and the room is going to feel like the thing punk rooms are supposed to feel like.

That's enough. That's more than enough.

Standout tracks: "The Horror Show," "Laughing and Bleeding," "I Miss California and Every Dog I've Ever Met," "5:55"