Good Mourning

Tea pairing: Lapsang tea with milk

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As of this writing, Alkaline Trio’s third LP, From Here to Infirmary, is 20 years old today. While Infirmary is an essential record in early 2000s pop punk, I have not shared the fanbases’s immense love for the album.

I do very much enjoy it and I do think that the album holds some of the catchiest songs, I have long felt that the 2001 effort was a sort of bandwagon record, with the band crafting lighter and faster tunes to stay close in popularity to other pop punk groups.

Again; I like the album and I love Alkaline Trio, but Infirmary just feels hollow when compared to the witty lyrics of the immaculate Goddamnit! and the moody tone of Maybe I’ll Catch Fire. But luckily, Trio took the best parts of their first three records and constructed the seminal Good Mourning.

From the scratchy vocals of Skiba on the opening track “This Could Be Love” to the humorously dark closing line of “Blue in the Face”, Good Mourning is a gloriously macabre slice of punk rock that has enough speed and bite to it to rival the Ramones and the Misfits.

Out of all of their records, Good Mourning holds some of the darkest imagery Trio has released and is the closest to a full on emo album to date, and in the time since its 2003 release, it has been noted as being an influential pop punk and emo record.

My introduction to Trio was a happy accident that started with my discovery of Goddamnit, and after listening to it for an entire summer, I then discovered Good Mourning and my love for Trio was cemented for all of time.

I cannot accurately express how much I love this record, how much this record means to me, or how influential this record is to me. All I can say is that Good Mourning is yet another album within the punk and emo genres that makes me love those genres more.

Good Mourning does an excellent job of mixing frenetic punk energy and Dario Argento-esque darkness to create a truly haunting listening experience with songs like “We’ve Had Enough”, “Continental”, “All on Black”, and “Donner Party (All Night)”.

It comes to no surprise that the album’s darkest tracks are penned and sung by Skiba, whao at the time, was a semi-follower of the Church of Satan. While the details of his alleged involvement in the church are unknown, it is clear some of the imagery and attitude found its way into the production of the album.

On the more pensive side of the album are the songs led by Andriano, who is at his best and most personal with some of my favorites like “Every Thug Needs a Lady”, “One Hundred Stories”, and “If We Never Go Inside” where he sings “Were you planning on staying forever/you don’t fit in this hole, remember/Hold your breath/walk, don’t run, through the graveyard.”

Good Mourning is where Trio found their proper footing in their now well-known emo/goth-punk sound that has drawn on everything from Jawbreaker, Satanism, and just about anything even slightly dark and macabre.

For the 17-year-old me that discovered this fantastic album it was everything my angsty self wanted in music, and now going on almost six years later I still feel entirely at home in the drunken, profanity-filled spooky punk that just seeps from one of Alkaline Trio’s most best records to date.