Banner Pilot's last album, Resignation Day earned them a lot of praise among punk fans. To me, I thought it was a very solid album but it didn't exactly stick out among the many great bands that are playing this style of punk right now. They're a good band, but I thought they were missing a few things before I could consider them anything superb. Those holes have been filled as their sound has skyrocketed on their Fat Wreck Chords debut, Collapser, which is already one of my favorite punk albums to come from this year.
One noticeable difference in Collapser is that the production quality has increased a lot compared to Resignation Day, and it really helps the band sound ten times better than they already did. Musically, they sound very similar to Dillinger Four mixed with The Lawrence Arms and early Jawbreaker, mostly due to Nick Johnson's vocals. His raspy singing style can easily be compared to Brendan Kelly's on most Lawrence Arms songs and Blake Schwarzenbach's on 24 Hour Revenge Therapy. The upped production helps Banner Pilot sound a lot more robust and the overall sound of the album is a lot more strong than it was on Resignation Day. It also helps that these guys can write one great hook after another to keep you interested in it the whole time. It's amazing how improved production can make the quality of a band's sound so much better.
Despite this, Collapser is a more of a lyrically driven record. A lot of punk bands today make great, catchy songs, but they're only good for so long. Banner Pilot's strikingly personal and story-telling lyrics are what makes them stick out among the many other bands like them. Take the opener, "Central Standard" for instance. A song that reflects a young man's life going down the drain due to alcoholism and trying to turn things around. The track "Drains into the Mississippi" deals with the struggle that comes with the ending of a relationship and the way Johnson delivers the lines:
Alone, I'm going home to an empty room / To have on Orchard road / Absurd fucking world / Feel like dropping dead, but I laugh instead. / Dumb guy, smart girl.
"Skeleton Key" is the story of a young girl who is going through depression and "Losing Daylight" is arguably the best song on the album, lyrically. The way Johnson writes lines so brutally honest and heartfelt make this track hit home for the listener. They also have a few more light-hearted tracks on Collapser like "Greenwood," which describes the feeling of going to a punk show and wanting the night to never end. That is what the whole record feels like to me. You almost get the feeling that you're at a punk show while listening to it and you just want it to keep going on forever. Too bad Collapser only lasts for a little over a half hour.
On first listen, this may come off as "just another Banner Pilot album" with better production but once you spend some time with it, you'll eventually find all of the great things about it. It's a fun record to listen to and carries a lot of great songwriting along with it. The band's sound has reached the potential that they showed on Resignation Day and they can now be considered one of the top new bands in the punk world. Fat Wreck definitely knew what they were doing when signing Banner Pilot as they have released one of the strongest records to come from the label in quite awhile.
