#as i have following MCR and erroneously believing my way into an MCRenaissance

[tumbloggingattheendofitall]

Hi I might be a lil crazy but I think that #JoshRamsay #MattWebb #IanCasselman and #MikeAyley of @mtrench deserve a fckn Grammy for Haven. Like, the song, the album, the amalgamation the tour has become. Something.

I don't like to prop shit up but listen, #Haven is 13-track Journey - which btw most of the MTrench albums have been similarly concept albums. Anyways. This album is a journey to unravel the concept of the Hero's journey through the lens of a book that Josh read, paired with the experiences of martial and domestic bliss, potential tension and upheaval in that process, and the added tension and fulfillment of parenthood - gaining that experience and simultaneously dealing with the loss of your own parents. It's an album steeped, deeply, in the 20-odd years of songwriting and composing and producing that Josh Ramsay has done in his career -sweeping riffs and strategic synths - mixed together with harmonies that shake the bones and soul of anyone that's listening. If you listen to only the singles, I can understand missing the awards-slash-Grammy potential here but I've listened to the album like a hundred times now and there cannot be a single way that I've somehow spent 52-odd minutes each time in it. And yet, I have. I have spent really, I'd guess, 24 hours at least listening to just the album in its entirety in the last 6 weeks. That excludes the singles which are similarly revelatory thus far -and if their Nights Like These want already anthemic, I anticipate a single/music video release the likes of which is rare in it's ability to unify disparate groups.

This group deserves a Grammy. This songwriter/composer/producer deserves a Grammy. Maybe I'm wrong that this album deserves it, not it's their 6th consecutive album and they've been doing this nearly as long as some of the younger entries to the RNR Hall of Fame and I suspect that the reason they've never received a Grammy has so much more to do with their being a Canadian band that has spent most of their career unsigned in the US, instead of having any reflection on the merit or integrity of their work. The only Signed album they ever delivered was incidentally their highest selling - it had crossover success in Hebrew and market that catapulted their international success and has led to the continued ability for global tours by the band, but I do fully believe, having followed them for easily half my life at this point, that even if they'd never signed with a US label, they'd have reached the creative output and zenith that Haven represents. This album is, I would argue, the easiest listening experience I've ever had by this band. I would never categorize it as easy-listening, of course, because it is fundamentally Rock, with a generous dose of Pop, I think (genres are difficult to diagnose) But while they aren't easy-listening by any stretch (the harmonies alone can be soul shattering ok) this album was not Challenging the same way that, for example, Astoria or Fix Me or Phantoms may have been. Each of those has similar concept elements that they played with (Fix Me was possibly the least Concept of the albums available but the overarching narrative can still be felt and is still often inaccessible) which challenge a listener to earnestly interview and question the central narrative and even go so far as to consider the narrator. Masterpiece Theatre and Every After pretty much directly challenge the listener to engage with the entire narrative the album presents and to question the narrator the whole way, to really sit with that perspective. And even with those wider analyses available, you still wind up with the occasional Nice Single like Fallout or All To Myself which personify specific aspects of the story and/or narrator's perspective in a way that is insanely accessible to any individual who's had the Why Me moment, in the romantic or sexual sphere.

Not that it's Grammy worthy, but why you should listen to Marianas Trench is because they are also a band that has continuously and unapologetically uplifted their fans and the central people they want to reach, and that have uplifted the value of the diverse people that connect with their music - lots of people from a wide variety of backgrounds can connect with the individual story of a single, and there are lots of those to choose from (may I suggest One Love, Didn't Miss Me?, Shake Tramp, or Celebrity Status for your perusal) but they are also aware encouraging of the different access points of those narratives. For every person that connects with Fallout or All To Myself Or Wildfire, for the yearning or whatever else, there's the people that give them over Sing Sing or Burning Up or Say Anything. And ask of these songs have an individual chord within the wider native grasp of the story that the album is trying to tell. Your spend the album seeing the native you're going through played out in an often cinematic way - love and loss, joy and ache, all materially spliced into an incredibly uplifting native that tells you as an individual listener that you are seen, heard, understood - no wonder then that their audience is so diverse except for the singular commonality of this one can't from I think Vancouver?

And so Haven is indeed uniquely deserving because it it not only the synthesis of these different methods of storytelling and struggle as music, it's also unique in that accessibility - it is arguably their most global narrative ever. I genuinely believe that anybody anywhere can relate deeply to at least one song from the album, but by far, for me, there is something that strikes a deep chord in the unity of the central phrase that the Song Haven employs - If We Fall, We All Fall Together. The entire album culminates in another call to action, arguably because there is recognition that once one Hero's journey ends, another begins. As the native of the album falls away, there's a central call to action in the form of CONNECT, STAY, BE PRESENT, BE HERE. It feels incredibly powerful as a bookend to the album itself, and even more powerful when informed by the history of their back catalog.

So said, I suspect that Haven't Had Enough or Stutter or Desperate Measures are much more likely to receive accolades before Haven't as an album does but if I can ever compel anything, I would compel the public who can influence these things, and honestly just anyone who wants a new band to listen to that's maybe just a little different than your usual, to give Haven an honest try as an album and discover which phase of the Hero's Journey in it that appeals deeply to you in this moment. (I'm on Nights Like These and A Normal Life, depending on the context, personally)

It's simultaneously an album of the moment, and a timeless tale of cycles and the breaking of them for better or worse. It's deeply heartfelt, and easily classed as the best album this band has ever released - a hard sell to fellow fans, but I've still received mostly positive counts on this opinion - because Haven culminates over two decades of work and life and experience, both personal and professional, into an artistic endeavor that was ambitious to create but feels only as ambitious as 52-odd minutes of music can be to engage with. And I do genuinely encourage everybody and anybody to just throw out on and let it play. Maybe it's the lyrics that get you, maybe it's the harmonies, maybe it's just the sound or the melodies or the overall vibe. But I can't find a battery way to suggest that more people need to hear this silly ambitious installment in the MTrench canon because it is genuinely a portrait of a moment in time and that portrait will look intensely personal to each person that listens.

For example I'm often dumb, very queer, mentally unwell, and etc ad nauseum. I simply think that maybe possibly, this album gets at something close to universal than many albums at the time. Also how cool would it be for a Whole Album to be up for various awards in this time frame that's been so dominated by the TikTok and Instagram Short version of musical virality

I don't think anyone I've talked to about it agreed on the best song, but they've all agreed with me that it's something really powerful that's masquerading as an innocuous pop/rock anthem

The accessibility is in the generality, but there are very real and felt inspirations that are expertly threaded here in a way that makes me genuinely lost at how best to explain or offer it to others

In that vein, I will help by posting a song that feels like ripping my heart out and seeing it here in full view even though all I've ever done, at most, was listen to it live and cry a little (a lot.) This is honestly one of the most generic singles they've ever released, but it touched something very deep and central for me in a way that I find impossible to describe without also just spilling my whole life story as fodder for anyone that sees this.