by David Wilikofsky
The seeds that would blossom into Camp Trash were first sewn in Southwest Florida many years ago. Singer Bryan Gorman and guitarist Keegan Bradford, both transplants from Rust Belt states, met in high school, building a quick rapport over their shared backgrounds and love of music. Joined by Bradford’s brother Levi on bass and drummer Alex Roberts, the group built buzz on the strength of their debut recording, 2021’s Downtiming. Their first album, The Long Way, The Slow Way, flesh out the quartet’s musical universe. Using the building blocks of emo and power pop, the group’s debut album perfectly captures the growing pains of your teens and twenties.
While listening to the album over the past few weeks, I was reminded of my own adolescence: feeling like an outsider in a small town, biding my time until I could escape. There’s a moment on the album that explicitly refers to this specific type of claustrophobia; while in one song they triumphantly declare “I’ll never go back to fucking Florida”, in the very next one they sing about someone headed right back in the opposite direction. But more often than not the anxieties and insecurities that permeates the album feel less specific. From agoraphobes whose best friends are their cats to listless wanderers whose floors are covered in piles of dirty laundry, the band’s carefully rendered portraits capture characters who just seem stuck, mired in the ennui of everyday life. Though the picture I’m painting may sound a bit bleak, the album also shows there’s a light at the end of the tunnel; as much as our struggles and listlessness feel permanent, we can outgrow and overcome them. Lead single “Let It Ride” sees its narrator attempting to shed anxieties that hold him back, while closer “Feel Something” is a tender love song that shows the power of human connection to combat disaffection. It’s less an album that wallows and more one that charts the ups and downs of young adulthood.
To be quite honest, I doubt that I would have listened to Camp Trash in my teens; I was a total music snob, and its emo-pop foundation would have probably seemed too accessible or mainstream. But I would have been missing out. The album is chock full of immediate musical pleasures (sticky riffs, anthemic choruses, front and center vocals), but even if these songs weren’t fiendishly catchy, they would have felt deeply relatable to an adolescent version of myself. And, honestly, they still do. More than anything,The Long Way, The Slow Way is an album full of songs steeped in lived experience, ringing true to their last note.