The Vapors
Together
Manmade Soul/The Vapors Own Records
Listen Below
[Read Libby Cudmore’s interview with David Fenton here]
The Vapors’ Together could be the soundtrack to a musical about a dramatically underappreciated band getting back together in their day-job retirement and finding the success they should have received 40 years ago. There’s a current of the band’s reunion story that runs throughout the album; songs that may sound like love songs could just as easily be about frontman David Fenton calling up his old bandmates Ed Bazalgette and Steve Smith—adding son Dan Fenton and substituting former drummer Michael Bowes for Howard Smith—to relive their glory days at the front of the stage.
And they are glorious days indeed.
From the top, the album balances the danceable pop of their debut LP New Clear Days (1980) with the grimy darkness of follow-up Magnets (1981), never falling into sentimentality or veering too deeply into the abyss. Songs like the lead single “Crazy” and the title track are infectiously cheerful, maintaining the band’s power-pop signature without ever sounding antique or barely microwaved. “Together,” in particular, adds a playfully paisley rhythm section, like a punk-rock Partridge Family.
The opening riff of “Crazy,” meanwhile, is the closest the album comes to the earworm of “Turning Japanese,” a caffeine-bright banger of a love song that proves definitively that while the members of the band have aged, their ability to rock has not. “King L,” a live show favorite, is a close second, driven by a garage-rock party riff, elevating it just slightly outside of the deeper melodies that populate much of the first half.
But it’s not all sunshine and applause. The Vapors have always delighted in crafting sparkling hooks and populating them with brutal lyrics. Joining the ranks of the paranoid “Bunkers” (New Clear Days) and “Jimmie Jones” (Magnets) is “The Girl From the Factory,” a morose, musically sparse tune full of shuffles and static electricity and low tones that you won’t be able to get out of your head.
Though Together’s 12 songs were all written between 2016 and 2019, they don’t shy away from recognizing the band’s past. There’s no better example of this than “Letter To Hiro (No.11),” a sequel to “Letter From Hiro” on New Clear Days. It would have been easy to repurpose the established melody on a saccharine sequel, but instead, Bowes rockpiles a jingoistic beat to remind us that in the end, though a country may win a war, the people sacrificed win nothing, that friendships and families are torn apart in a patriotic fervor.
“Letter” isn’t the only echo to their debut album. The ending track “Nuclear Nights” is an obvious play on the album’s Cold War title, but it goes deeper than that, a bittersweet homage to their fans and the goodbye at the end of every show (“Don’t cry when it ends / just tell all your friends / and they’ll come around again”).
This album exists because of a dedicated fanbase who followed them from club to club, chipped in a couple bucks to bring them to America for three sold-out shows at the Mercury Lounge, and listening to Fenton say “we can always be friends” does more for that connection, especially in this time of disconnect, than any Facebook update or Twitter retweet. It’s Easter eggs like this that help a listener feel like Fenton and Co. wrote the album exclusively for them, but at no point is it fully fan-service. If anything, it’s a great introduction to a new generation, who might then go back and pull out their parents’ copy of New Clear Days.
(Fans of the band’s live shows might be disappointed that concert favorite “One of My Dreams” did not make the album, and limitations in the format means that the vinyl release is missing “In Babylon” and “I Don’t Remember,” which are both available on the CD and digital release.)
“We can all be brothers in Babylon / we can all be sisters in Babylon,” Fenton sings on “Babylon.” When Fenton penned this song—and the title track—he had no idea the band would be releasing their new album in the middle of a global pandemic. But Together, might just be the antidote to our cabin fever, an anthem for our eventual reunions with friends and family.
Together indeed.
Notable Tracks: “In Babylon” | “Nuclear Nights” | “Together”
Note: As an Amazon affiliate partner, Albumism may earn commissions from purchases of products featured on our site.
LISTEN: