Nobody likes a winner, baby. That's just the way it works. Don't wanna envy people we could just as easily dismiss as jerks.
--"Nobody Likes a Winner," The Breakup Society
On their album Nobody Likes a Winner, The Breakup Society, led by singer/rhythm guitarist/songwriter Ed Masley, build a wall of contradictions. With the music, they embrace elements of pop, garage, and punk to create an often bright, always melodic and catchy sound, but Masley's lyrics tell tales of discontent, anger, loss, regret, etc. Somehow, it works.
Though the album contains more mid-tempo and slow songs than all-out rockers, it has a nice balance. It opens with "Nobody Likes a Winner," which moves at a steady clip but still has room for lovely harmonies, a few jazz chords The Beatles might have used, and a catchy melody. In the lyrics, Masley seems to take jabs at both winners and the losers who don't like them (or maybe just the winners). In "The World Will Change Our Love," a bright melody and jangling guitars wrap around lyrics about love grown stale with age: "When your work is a drag and I'm drinkin' from a bag." Still, that doesn't mean the song can't have a bridge full of Beach Boys "oooh" and "bops."
The chords in "How Failure Saved Me From Myself" could have worked in a standard, and the arrangement has elements of later Beatles songs. The lyrics circle around in contradictions. In the verses, the singer posits on all the ways he could have been a jerk, only to sing in the chorus, "Failure saved me from myself. Saved me from myself. Now I'm no threat to me." Like "Nobody Likes a Winner," the song, or at least its singer, seems to suggest that success robs you of humanity, yet the singer of "How Failure Saved Me From Myself" admits in the last chorus, "Now I'm no threat to me. Not like I was wishin' I could be."
"13th Angry Man," the first of a handful of third person songs, follows similar ideas as "The World Will Change Our Love." A once loving man has turned into a sort of madman, "Like Buford Pusser walkin' tall again, he's got a bat but there's no ball again." Yet his wife or girlfriend stays with him. Here again, the music supports the emotions. The verses rock with punk guitars and garage keyboards. In the choruses, "her friends say 'You should leave him.' But her friends don't understand the way this world could turn the boy she knew into the 13th Angry Man." Here the guitars shimmer, leave space, and it feels a little bit like a dream. The song ends with similar guitars, drenched in reverb, and bleeds into "This Little Tragedy," which sounds a little like a ragged Roy Orbison ballad (see the video below).
In "By a Thread," Masley once again couples pop ideas with un-pop lyrics. It opens with a guitar hook playing a pleasant melody. Scott McCaughey of The Minus 5 takes over on guest vocals for this song. His warmer voice provides extra contrast to lyrics about a man still longing for vengeance on high-school bullies from 1964: "The past don't follow him around. It tried escapin' but he tracked it down. And now every day just stings a little more." Yet, the chorus suggests that as much as his anger is consuming him, it also "keeps him hanging on by a thread."
Both the rocking "Another Candlelit Night" and the swing-like "Lower Expectations" return to the dangers of success or desiring success. In each, romantic success becomes the focus. The woman in "Another Candlelit Night" pines for a man "out of her reach," who "[pledges] his love as she drifts off to sleep." In the second verse, a man longs for a woman, and though "he's not a prince among men," "he's willing to try." He could be longing for the woman from the first verse, the unrequited and unnoticed third in a love triangle where no one's connected. He could also be her fantasy, where she doesn't notice the man longing for her. Either way, her desires create her sadness. The man and woman in "Lower Expectations" have learned to give up on fantasies. Once they had big dreams: "He used to dream he'd date a movie star," and, "She used to dream she'd be a movie star." Instead, he's some sort of office drone, but "now his world don't seem so grey. Oh, he's got lower expectations. He's smiling more, he's crying less, since giving up happiness." She's still hanging onto some dreams, but at the end of the song when they cross paths as she serves him coffee, she, too, lowers her expectations, and they find a bit of hope together.
In the final songs, the singers start to address their malaise in more active ways than in earlier songs. Granted the singer in the barreling "The Day Before The First Day of the Rest of My Life" could be full of it. It's very possible every day is the day before the first day of the rest of his life. The music certainly feels desperate. "I Didn't Mean to Wreck Your Life" again conjures the ghost of The Beatles through chord choices and harmonies. Here, the singer wants to take back hurt he's caused. "Forget The Past," takes this idea a step further: "We'll hit rewind to when your love was blind. Pause awhile on the day your smile said you were in love with me." The big sound of the chorus, with its jangling guitars and trumpet fills, turns the idea of forgetting the past into a anthem. In the slow build of "This Doesn't Matter," the singer determines to leave behind sorrow, come "out of the clouds," and have a good night. Strings swell and "fake tympani" crashes as he repeats, "Good night, it's gonna be a good night."
This mix of elements could have easily created a mess, but Masley, the band, and producer Bob Hoag (who also plays many different cool keyboards) find a good balance. The pop elements never sound too pretty or polished. While that's great for The Beach Boys, it might have undermined the tension between the music and lyrics. Masley's voice is not exactly polished either. To be honest, its slightly strained sound takes some getting used to. Still, it adds to the roughness. With songs like these, especially the poppier ones, it would be easy to key in one one big emotion for the entire song, but these arrangements rise and fall, often in unexpected ways, creating a dynamic experience. Despite the darkness of the lyrics and the dabs of irony, the album never feels gloomy or cold because the music contains a so many emotions. Nobody Likes a Winner is a winner that you can like.
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