Eric Celia, a fervent Blink-182 fan, recently found himself in a predicament that echoed his favorite band’s “Enema of the State” single “What’s My Age Again?” Despite his best efforts, he was unable to recall how old he currently is.
After wowing the crowd at a local karaoke bar with his spot-on rendition of “I Miss You,” seamlessly alternating between Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge’s vocal parts, he attracted a woman’s attention in the audience.
However, Eric hit an unexpected snag when this woman, whom we will call “Josie” to protect her anonymity, approached him to learn more about him, including his age. Despite confidently remembering every lyric to every Blink song, he was drawing a blank. Was he 32 or 33? Or had he lost a decade entirely and was actually approaching his mid-40s? Or worse, mid-50s? The exact number eluded him, leaving him momentarily flustered.
Thinking on his feet, Eric managed to divert the conversation from his age-related amnesia.
“That was a close one. Thankfully, I could shift the focus by offering to recite ‘The Party Song’ from start to finish at my place—a proposal she couldn’t resist,” said Celia while searching for his drivers license. “I normally just calculate my age from the current year, but to be honest I am not really sure what year it is, either. I’ve been in a haze ever since Blink released ‘California’ and I still haven’t come out of it.”
Managing to avoid the calamity of admitting he had no degree of certainty regarding his exact age, he reflected on a similar recent incident.
“My buddy is always ranting about the government and Wall Street fat cats gaming the system, but I don’t have time for worrying about all that. I told him it’s just like Blink says: ‘corporate leaders, politicians, kids can’t vote, adults elect them.’ He was like ‘Dude, you have been able to vote since the second Clinton administration.’”
There are many competing theories as to why an aging Blink-182 fan could forget their age, but one psychologist feels like they cracked the code.
“If you are a middle-aged man who exclusively shops for shoes at Vans, specifically the Vans outlet store, it’s easy to forget you’re no longer 19. You look down and all your clothes look like they have for nearly 30 years, but then you look in the mirror and it’s a wrinkled stranger looking back at you,” said Emira Tostlenca Ph.D.
Realizing that perhaps he would live the rest of his life intermittently having no clue how old he was, he sighed “Well, I guess this is growing up.”
Yes, we know this is a country album and not technically released under the official Tiger Army brand. If you’re that bothered by it, scroll down a little and you’ll find the psychobilly reviews you’re so hungry for. The rest of us can appreciate that Tiger Army has always been heavily influenced by country/western music. Nick 13 dropped the decidedly un-psycho “Outlaw Heart” into his band’s first album, and it’s still their most popular song 25 years later. His solo project is not the twangy alt-country that hypes up crowds at the county fair. It’s a sincere and well polished collection of Americana by an artist who clearly knows and loves it. Tiger Army classics “Cupid’s Victim” and “In The Orchard” both get the country treatment here. The former sounds like one of those mashups where they change the genre of a song with AI. If you and your country-loving coworker can’t agree on what to play in the car while you drive him to work after the court took his license away, this is a decent compromise.
This was a tough one. “Retrofuture” is a wide-ranging sampler of genres. There’s some rock, Americana, a little psychobilly. There’s even a love ballad about the moon that’s entirely in Spanish. The songs all work. Nothing feels forced or like it was included just for the sake of adding another genre to the list. It all feels like a Tiger Army Album. But this showcase of Nick 13’s range is exactly what puts it last on this list. It is one of those albums that so clearly separates a band’s “new stuff” from their “old stuff”. If you’ve been a fan of Tiger Army since the beginning, this isn’t psychobilly enough to meet your expectations. And if you haven’t been a fan since the beginning, what made you start with their new album, in 2019? Overall, it’s good, but something has to be last on this list, and it honestly came down to semantics.
This is their fifth album. Its name is derived from the Roman numeral V, representing the number 5, and the corresponding morse code for the letter V, not the number 5, which would have been too logical. We ranked it 5th overall because this was confusing and also because their first four albums were better than this one. “V” has a more relaxed bluesy style than previous Tiger Army offerings, and way more piano. Neither of these take away from the quality of the album, but it’s not exactly what the cuffed-jeans-and-flat-top crowd gets excited about. Nick 13, with yet another brand new lineup, chose dark ominous tones more often than the dark ominous lyrics typical of his contemporaries. Tiger Army’s music is mostly free of the usual tropes about zombies, banging dead people, or just how awesome horror movies are in general, and “V” is no exception. Any talk of haunting is in reference to the dreams of a lover, not ghouls.
We could have just ranked these all in reverse chronological order. And there’s maybe a good argument to be made in favor of that. But that seemed too “their first album was better” of us, so we decided to nitpick production quality on these early ones. This self-titled debut goes hard from the beginning, with the clacking double bass intro on “Nocturnal” prepping us for a textbook example of late-1990s/early-2000s psychobilly. “Tiger Army” does a better job than most of using show-not-tell lyrics about fog and the night rather than gore and body horror to tell its story. The only real problem with this album comes about three or four songs in when you realize that double bass CLICK is not just a choice they made for the opening song, but rather the result of sound mixing that left it way too prominent in the final product. It’s distracting enough that this album gets knocked down several ranks for this alone.
This was the first album Tiger Army released since their debut that didn’t have Roman numerals in its name. It was at the time the cleanest sounding record they had released. It lives in the uncanny valley between their faster early albums and Nick 13’s more experimental later work with its lengthy love ballads and Spanish guitar. This fourth album meant a fourth personnel change as well. Nick 13 is the only remaining member of Tiger Army’s original lineup. It’s impressive that they kept a fairly consistent style through these first few albums, but that goes to show how much this band has always just been singer/songwriter/guitarist Nick 13 with a rotating assortment of backing musicians on bass and drums. “Regions Beyond” continued the trend started by “Ghost Tigers” of Tiger Army getting more mellow with age. It’s not entirely without punk energy – there are a few screamo bits in “Hotprowl,” for example – but this album lacks the energy of their earlier work.
Do you hear it? That click is back. What’s with the ever-changing sound levels between each of these first four records? “Power of Moonlight,” for example, has almost no detectable bass click. And the same person is credited on bass for both albums (a record at the time for any of the 7 current or former backing members of this 3-piece group) but each sounds completely different. It’s one of life’s great mysteries. Anyways, “Ghost Tigers” starts out as an indisputable psychobilly record before shifting gradually into a calmer, genre-bending jam session. We’re shown an Americana-influenced sound that focuses more than its predecessors on Nick 13’s soothing vocals. If you’re upset that this album wasn’t first on our list, you probably would have enjoyed Nick 13’s country album had you not skipped it when we tried to bring it up earlier. You should go back and listen to “Nick 13” before you read the next entry. We’ll wait for you.
Welcome back. Does the steel guitar on “In The Orchard” make more sense now? Oh, you still didn’t listen to the country album? Of course you didn’t. More importantly, doesn’t this remind you of early AFI? It should, since it features loads of guest vocals from Davey Havok, as well as the bass support of AFI’s recently separated Geoff Kresge. If one of your friends suddenly started wearing creepers and a pompadour in 2002, “Power of Moonlight” is likely the album that got them into the psycho scene. It perfectly blends Nick 13’s punk roots with his affinity for any style that can be played on an upright bass. At a punk-appropriate runtime of 13 tracks and under 40 minutes, this album had no room for duds or filler. “When the Night Comes Down”, in particular, sets a high bar for future psychobilly acts to follow when they, too, write their scene-mandated songs about being in love with vampires.
