If I had a coin for every time an indie rock band named a song “Take It Or Leave It,” I’d have three coins – which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened thrice. Unfortunately, COIN’s rendition is the worst of the three by a considerable margin.
Earnestly, it hurts to pile on their new album “I’m Not Afraid Of Music Anymore.” I love COIN dearly. The song “Youuu” single-handedly got me through the past two-and-a-half years, so much so that COIN dethroned One Direction’s seven-year streak at the top of my yearly Spotify rewind. COIN’s new album was supposed to be their most candid and self-expressive yet, but if this is their most self-expressive, I beg of them — please go back to selling out.
I will give COIN credit and say the album release started on the right foot. The preliminary releases had me genuinely excited. I’ve always appreciated COIN’s catchy riffs and bright chord progressions.
The lead single, “Strawberry Jam,” is subtly beautiful in a way, connecting the calming, vulnerable energy of previous songs such as “You Are The Traffic” and “Getting Older” with the upbeat tempo of their defining hit “Talk Too Much.” The lyrics speak to me, talking about a puppy love relationship based on surface-level attraction with deeper emotional consequences. “I leave you there in a parking lot/Do it again and again” indicates a deeper cycle of leaving as soon as things get intense and the woman saying, “Why you leaving me?/Why you leaving me?” at the end pays homage to the emotional toll the narrator’s actions have taken on their partner.
“Take It Or Leave It” was a small blip in the road — I loved the vibe of the piece and the instrumentals were quintessential COIN, but it felt incomplete and the lyrics quite superficial. “Slack” was my favorite song on the album by far. The structure of the song reminds me of one of COIN’s most popular hits, “Crash My Car.” The vocals drowning out in the chorus, the drum breakdown, the slowing down at the chorus: this is COIN at its finest.
Unfortunately, the album goes downhill fairly quickly after that. The other songs on this album did not match the quality of the singles in any way, shape or form. It felt like a constant battle between sticking to the sonic palette that made COIN popular or trying something new. Most songs had me longing for them to wrap up.
Nowhere is this more embodied than the song “Problem,” which seems like a cheap imitation of one of their more recent hits, “Chapstick.” It’s going for the same hint of grunge in its sound, but the song is not catchy or captivating at all, really. It’s a pretty tough listen. The rest of the album follows a similar path, with a couple decent songs scattered in a mediocre track list that sounds more like filler than anything else.
Going from the transcendent melancholy of songs like “Youuu” which made me fall in love with COIN to this is heartbreaking. Maybe the album will grow on me. I sure hope it does. But until then, when faced with the choice of taking it or leaving it – I’ll choose to leave it.
