Album Review :: Transit :: Young New England

Written by: Andrea Janov, CC2K Music Editor

Transit :: Young New England out now on Rise Records 

I was never a huge Transit fan but I am a Misser fan…So I guess that makes me kind of a Transit fan once removed. Young New England is way more indie than their earlier albums, but all those albums were gradually leading here. And I fucking love it. There is so much emotion and intensity both expressed and simmering underneath. You feel as though you are being let in on something personal as you listen to these songs. The fire is burning and simmering all the time somewhere deep inside the band – inside the songs themselves.

The album starts with Nothing Lasts Forever, it begins with a whispered intensity and progresses with this great cadence that stresses at the exact right times. It is catchy yet not poppy and has a beat that will carry you along. Second to Right has a fantastic bass line, is catchy, and will get you moving. This is one of the tracks that will lodge itself in your brain and you will be singing the chorus for the next few hours…or days. Sleep has a great hook and these pauses and stutters of silence that are memorizing. So Long, So Long has a unique cadence and is full this beautiful muted intensity that is allowed to sing out at moments but never totally break free. Weathered Souls, starts out dark (compared to the rest of the tracks) yet doesn’t stay there long. The track progresses and the melody kicks in and by the end you want to be singing and clapping along to the beat – and I am sure that is exactly what every pit will be doing.

Hang It Up is a quiet track with a slightly different vibe than the previous tracks. Don’t Go, Don’t Stray is indie and slightly poppy with some great “whoa”s. Thanks for Nothing is also a indie poppy track with even better “whoa”s and has some killer lyrics that I wished that had written, “we had the world hanging on the edge of our keys”. Summer, ME has more lyrics that are simply amazing, “I hear the radio singing songs that we knew / The ones my mother fell in love to / play it over and again / back til you begin to / match the beating of your heart with the ringing in your ears”. The last track, Lake Q, is the perfect ending to this album. It is deconstructed, soft, stripped music, with beautiful vocals, it is so fucking pretty. If you thought you were in love with this album, then you get to the song and you fall in love all over again.

The song that I had to listen to over and over again is, the title track, Young New England. It is a hybrid between and indie emo song and a barroom ballad. Personal, intimated, with a chorus that can be sung by a barroom full of commiserators until it becomes an anthem. It is a song that connect immediately because of the identifiable young love and heartache subject matter and it’s catchiness. What really strikes me about this track is that there are moments that you feel alone because of the voice and moments when you feel that there are a million voices of support.

As someone who has a strong (if not romanticized) connection to her hometown scene, the people, and the carefree nights this album connected with me on so many levels. Young New England is a love letter to being young in Boston – with a dash of nostalgia. It is an album full of songs that you play in your car as you are driving around a quiet home town at 3am looking at it with fresh eyes.