Article by Marzia Picciano
When at the end of May i Bleachers announced the release of everyone for ten minutestheir fifth latest album, together with the only Italian date in Milan The November 5 (where you will find me, regardless of developments on Hormuz), and after listening to it several times, I had already imagined starting a review by titling it “Find yourself someone who loves you like Jack Antonoff loves his wife”. Today, with tabloid events in hand, I thought it was time to resume the postponed effort and look at this work with new eyes, which in the end are always the same. Anyway, as lovers.
Because the fact that Antonoff and his wife, the actress Margaret Qualley, are all over the media in a hypothetical phase of crisis or divorce is not a simple matter of gossip, but the real mirror of what “falling in love” means today. Intended as: throwing yourself headfirst into a relationship, filling your mind and lungs with an exultation that is longed for rather than really intended, abusing it to suck everything away, the good, the bad, the true and the false, and doing it as quickly as possible. In a word, burn. After three years of a fairytale story, saying goodbye (and obviously we're speculating here, because it's an excellent device for telling the story of the album). As if there was no other way to love.
I wish I could say that everyone for ten minutes (no caps lock, all in understatement, or just more cautious than previous explosions) you talk about Antonoff's life, about being vulnerable and visible to the world for 10 minutes like in an Airdrop, which you stigmatize in a perfect Easy Coast sound the sense of loneliness and the ancestral pain that transforms your bed into a tunnel, who tells us about his hardcore journey in van to assimilate the basics of a pop rock with noble birth (those of Springsteenwho not surprisingly wanted him on stage with him). Instead, after listening to it for the umpteenth time, I was convinced that, very simply, it talks about her falling in love. About what was in his life before, after and during.
Explanatory premise necessary. THE Bleachers are the band of Jack Antonoff, known mostly (aime) for being the multitalented one deus ex machina of a large part of the current musical star system made in the USA or producer of Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Clairo, Sabrina Carpenter, Florence + The Machine so to speak, and Swift would be enough and advance, but also a singer and musician capable of making a splash (with Fun. And We Are Young in heavy rotation on all radios for time immemorial). Well, he has more Grammys (13) than soul (this is capitalism too), but in my heart he is also the author of a Christmas song that I listen to almost every week (and to me, Christmas songs are as shitty as the Band Aid phenomena).
In short, I have always liked Antonoff, this shy boy with the big face and protruding ears, just as I like assholes with talent. Probably even that super-cool Margaret Qualley thought so when they met at that elusive rooftop party, I don't see any other explanation. She immediately entered into his creative narrative, as in the most classic of love at first sight. Or at least, I like to think so, so everything else can be explained. In the end, to sell me records you also have to make me passionate about history, whatever it is (and it's been done since the times of archaic Greece).
It cannot be a mere commercial choice to launch as the first single you and foreverwith a video featuring the gorgeous Qualley, dancing throughout the house preparing for Antonoff who incredibly arrives at his destination, despite being beaten, left dying on the pavement, in the rain, with his clothes torn; in short, she takes it that we wouldn't even touch it with a spiky cane, to him, who in this metaphor of the path of life wants to tell us that in the end you get to your person (cit) and she waits for you. “Forever's crying out for a savior/No Jesus Christ, no Roman gods, they cower and you let me in”. Presenting a record like this means celebrating the love for what it makes you do, even the sense of nostalgia for a present that will become the past as upstairs at els and the clique of friends he brings with him always seems to indicate that. Let's talk about that stuff that makes you go stupid and talk like an enlightened person, embrace the impossible. But also provide you with a rejuvenating joy that you can't get or buy anywhere else.
For this reason, and for all the incredible aura that the story of the two has generated, sweeping away the shadows that child prodigy or presumed such usually lurk behind the oversized glasses of an emotionally complex intellectual or the most affable smile (Lena Dunham would have something to say, or indeed, he said it), I can't imagine what these 11 songs should ultimately talk about, different interior moments homogeneously integrated into a now very recognizable sound, that of the new cultured American pop, full of references to a more dreamy than dreamy suburb (we're talking about pieces like I'm not joking and of the sax of dirty wedding dress).
In the end they said in a film that a man becomes the stories he tells, and everyone for ten minutes it is the story of a man who wanted to crystallize in a speech of about 39 minutes the true moment of madness of his existence, that crazy risk that we all want to run at all costs, of feeling that something makes sense, even if this has the same effect as a building – that of your stability – collapsing. Even, and indeed above all, if you do it very quickly.
Everyone for ten minutes it's a small ode to burning oneself consciously, and it won't be gossip, or perhaps it will be precisely that which tells me to listen to this record even more, to show up in November at Alcatraz and to have Antonoff tell me what remains of a whole series of risky choices, planes bought at 2 in the morning for 8 on the same day, excessive hours spent on trains for senseless detours, money spent in absolute unconscious joy, books of poems that perhaps we will never be able to appreciate, and a lots of words, in general, including insults. Of how we were when we were vulnerable, and for whom, in front of everyone, even more than 10 minutes. Because the unsaid is that as in pain, even in love one is tremendously selfish, and the latest album by Bleachers in the end he also tells us about this. And now, it's worth even more.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
