My Ghost Vapes

Proper Dose is a fall record

The Story So Far put out their best album the day before autumn started. It has sounded like October ever since.

, 6 minute read

Some albums belong to a season. Proper Dose belongs to fall, and I will argue with anybody about it.

The Story So Far released it on September 21, 2018. Fall started the next day. I doubt anybody planned that, but it fits too well to ignore.

I came to it late. I didn’t catch this train until 2023, five years after the record came out. But I am a huge fan now, and this is the one I keep going back to.

The loudest kid in the room

If you only know one thing about The Story So Far, it is Parker Cannon’s voice.

The band formed in Walnut Creek, California in 2007 and named themselves after a New Found Glory song. It is not just the name, either. The whole sound comes out of New Found Glory. If you want to hear it in one track, go find “680 South,” off a split they put out in 2010, before there was even a first album. 680 is the freeway that runs through their hometown, and the song is New Found Glory through and through.

Between 2011 and 2015 they put out three albums on Pure Noise Records, and on all three Cannon sounds like he is losing an argument in a parking lot. It is a bark, and a whole wave of pop punk bands spent the next ten years trying to copy it.

He had another gear on top of that. In 2014 he started a hardcore project called Snarl and put a four-song demo up on Bandcamp. He played the guitar and the bass on it himself, with Cam McBain on drums. This one was all screaming.

The anger was not only on the records. In April 2016, at a club in Toronto called the Mod Club, a fan climbed on stage in the middle of a song to take a selfie, and Cannon kicked her off the stage and back into the crowd. The video went everywhere. She said afterward that she was not hurt and had no hard feelings. The club banned the band for good, and its manager called it a very cowardly act. As far as I can find, neither Cannon nor the band ever addressed it publicly.

I have no memory of that happening. I was not listening yet.

Then it got quiet

The band toured almost nonstop from 2012 to 2016, and it wore them down. Cannon told NME in 2018 that there had been no time left to be creative. He also said, on the record, that he had been abusing Xanax to get through the highs and lows of tour, and that it numbed him so badly he had trouble writing at all.

What got him writing again was writing about exactly that. The title track is about his relationship with the pills. “Out of It” is about the gap between the medicated version of himself and the sober one.

Three years went by between albums. In pop punk that is a lifetime.

What it sounds like

It does not sound like the first three. The band had been listening to Oasis, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, and for the first time they made a record with no deadline hanging over it. Sam Pura produced it. The guitars are wider and warmer. “Take Me as You Please” is an acoustic ballad. “Line” is mostly instrumental.

And Cannon sings. No bark. Turns out the guy could carry a melody the whole time.

It debuted at number 19 on the Billboard 200.

Lover boy, sad boy

As much as I am a lover boy, I am a sad boy too. The two go hand in hand. Cover to cover, Proper Dose is the best written and most deeply felt of all their albums.

The title track and “Out of It” remind me of my own struggles with prescription drug use and addiction.

“If I Fall” reminds me of a relationship that was fraught with hurt feelings, distrust and uncertainty.

“Upside Down” and “Take Me as You Please” remind me of relationships I burned to the ground and can never go back to. Black holes that were once filled with warmth and love. Now blown apart, never to return.

Why it is a fall record

The first three albums are summer: fast, loud and sure of themselves. Proper Dose is what comes after. It slows down, cools off and takes stock of the damage.

I am not the only one who hears it. There are a ton of fan videos out there calling it the fall album, like this one. One college radio review at the time even said “Take Me as You Please” was made for relaxing on a fall day.

He kept going

The best part is what he did next.

In 2020 he started No Pressure with Pat Kennedy from Light Years and Harry Corrigan from Regulate. It is the opposite of Proper Dose: short, fast skate punk. Where The Story So Far came out of New Found Glory, No Pressure sounds like Blink-182. That is not a guess. The band names Blink as a major influence, right alongside Lifetime and Kid Dynamite, and Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge have both praised them publicly. They put out an album in 2022 and another one, NP Style, this past July.

The Story So Far came back too, with I Want to Disappear in 2024.

So now there are three versions of the same guy. Snarl was him at his angriest. No Pressure is him having fun. The Story So Far is where he tells the truth, and Proper Dose is the record where he figured that out.

October 17

I have had two chances to see these bands and missed both.

A couple of years ago I was up on Long Island around Thanksgiving and The Story So Far played Brooklyn. Missed it. This past March No Pressure played Atlantic City. Missed that one too.

Not this time. On October 17 The Story So Far open their fall tour at the Dome in Virginia Beach, with The Starting Line and Ultra Q. I will be there, and I am so excited about it.

A fall record, in the fall, in Virginia. That will do.

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