Feedback gives way to muted guitar chords on opener “Hopeless Dreamer.” As the song builds up to the explosion kicking off MakeWar’s debut Fat Wreck Chords effort Get It Together, guitarist/vocalist Jose Prieto announces, “The night is drunk / and we’re still young” before dropping out leaving Greg Taylor’s hi-hat to teeter on the edge of explosion. You can just sense the band members, rounded out by bassist Edwin Santacruz, looking at each other knowingly as the hi hat speeds before launching into the meat of the album. They’ve nailed this new set of songs.
Get It Together sounds like an album where the night is drunk and youth seems in reach. It comes with anxiety, the setbacks, the highs, and the why the fuck are we here type questions that keep your heart beating. In fact, that heart literally does beat on second track “My Bones” in the bridge as panic ensues into chants of “Break me / Break me.” The album is filled to the brim with modern day panic mixed through a modern day take on the Fat Wreck Chords 90s sound. MakeWar incorporate the driving double stick work, not quite hardcore heaviness of SoCal punk rock, and rock the fuck out sheen of In Utero.
That grunge is best heard on standout track “Squeeze.” Prieto sings about the lack of sleep that stems from a constant and overarching dread. “Trying to sleep / Counting the sheep / Shrinking myself / Slowing the beat / I don’t wanna die today” admits the paranoid sounding vocals which compliment Taking Back Sunday style back-ups later in the song. “Inmunda Realidad” puts MakeWar in Dead To Me territory tackling family separation. While never directly stating it, living in Trump’s America hangs over a handful of songs. “Welcome to your nine to five / When you call in sick / You better be dying” sings Prieto on “Oh, Brother.” Earlier on “No Más” Pietro remarks “Fuck the labels / We’re all different / We all don’t live in your cliché” in some of the seemingly intentionally only sung-in-English lyrics on the driving song calling out bigotry against the LatinX community.
Get It Together is 2019 punk rock through and through. It adds in elements from a very narrow spectrum of grunge and alternative rock that parallels a modern-day Fat Wreck sound. It builds on MakeWar’s previous efforts at every turn.