Cliffdiver

Cliffdiver

There was a bird Matthew Ehler had seen in his backyard before, but he’d never really stopped to look at it. A red-headed woodpecker, a strange-looking bird. One day, it caught his attention. Ehler and his Cliffdiver bandmates had recently been to hell and back. In some ways, they’d been making that return trip a few times over for much of their lives. After years of more self-destructive escapes from everyone’s respective demons and traumas, Ehler started to embrace the stillness of birdwatching. “It was something to occupy my mind,” he explains. His new hobby wouldn’t just lend Cliffdiver’s sophomore album its title, but signal a spiritual overhaul rippling through the band.

In the two years since their debut album Exercise Your Demons, Cliffdiver had been back out hitting the pavement, building a name for themselves in the pop-punk and emo landscape. By the time they finished opening stints with Bowling For Soup and Less Than Jake, and an array of festival dates including Sad Summer Fest — where they played with bands like Taking Back Sunday, Hot Mulligan, The Maine and more — the septet was ready to hunker down and write more music. Riffs started arriving in January of 2023, and an album called birdwatching was completed by March of this year. That makes it sound simple. But the journey to their second outing was full of complex emotional reckonings.

The origins of Cliffdiver go all the way back to 2017, when Ehler wanted to move past the unabashed Blink-182 worship of his previous band. Over the years, lineups shifted and expanded, until early 2021 when the seven-piece had settled into Ehler on guitar, Joey Duffy and Briana Wright on vocals, Gilbert Erickson on guitar, Tyler Rogers on bass, Eliot Cooper on drums, and Dony Nickles on sax. All of them veterans of Tulsa’s vibrant and interconnected music scene, their collaboration kicked up steam fast — over a host of EPs, singles, and Exercise Your Demons, they went from DIY shows to headlining Tulsa’s legendary Cain’s Ballroom.

By the time all that happened, the members of Cliffdiver had entered their thirties. While Exercise Your Demons already portrayed people aging and trying to figure themselves out, it was still filtered through the chaos of waning youths. The album was a frenzied party that, in turn, depicted frenzied partying throughout. birdwatching is the work of a whole different band, an album specifically grappling with abandoning cyclical behaviors and addictions that no longer serve you. It’s pop-punk maturing into grown-ass adult travails.

While Exercise Your Demons had some markers of a “pandemic” album — all the band members in isolation, writing alone — Duffy characterizes birdwatching as a “collaborative labor of love.” Cliffdiver began piecing ideas together, then decamped to Barber Shop Studios in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey for thirty days to work with producer Brett Romnes (Hot Mulligan, Mom Jeans, Free Throw, and many others). On some level, they were freaked out: They didn’t feel like they had all the material necessary to be ready for the sessions. This ended up being a pro, not a con. “The last album, we had all these songs and this story,” Duffy explains. “This one isn’t a big narrative, but a collection of moments, and we got to fine tune it in the studio. We had the freedom to say ‘Let’s get weird.’”

“You can’t talk about us as a band going forward without that trip to New Jersey,” Wright says of the recording session. Joking that Romnes put in “extra camp counselor hours,” the band credits him not only with a steady hand when encouraging them to push their own creative boundaries, but also teaching them how to function more healthily as an ensemble.

“We always say ‘Let go and let Brett,’” Duffy quips. “He’d always say, ‘Are you afraid? There’s no fear in this dojo.’”

Romnes might’ve been speaking more about studio experimentation, but it was a refrain relevant to the themes of birdwatching too. Across its twelve tracks, the album has no shortage of heaviness, from schisms with dogmatically religious family members, to sleep paralysis demons, and detaching oneself from abusers. Throughout, Duffy and Wright candidly grapple with mental health struggles — less than mired in those moments, they are processing how you can make miles of personal progress and still lapse into frustrating spirals. For Duffy’s part, it was the first album he wrote after getting sober amidst the release of Exercising Your Demons. “There was some apprehension that I wouldn’t be able to write like I used to,” he admits, before joking: “It was good to see without the alcohol I’m still insane, so there’s plenty of things to draw from.”

Just a few months into birdwatching’s gestation, the whole band went through a horrific experience together. While on tour, a freak accident led to a truck chain link flying into their van and nearly killing Rogers. While Rogers made a miraculous recovery, the brush with morality stuck with all of them.

“Being that close to death will change anybody,” Ehler says, who actually picked up his birdwatching habit in direct response to the van accident. “Making it known how real it is. It made me stop caring as much about things like being online, partying, etc. I’ve slowed down on so much stuff.”

“It was such a major event in all our lives that came out of nowhere,” Duffy adds. The aftermath, wracked with pain and anxiety, found Cliffdiver collectively adopting healthier habits and channeling it into the music. “That energy was transformed from something very negative to something I think can help people,” Duffy continues.

Wright had a prompt for the album: No more wallowing in all the bad things that have happened and endless self-analyzing, but presenting these struggles in the context of growing up, healing, moving on, and locating some sense of hope for the future. birdwatching takes all Cliffdivers’ individual battles and turn them over in different lights, approaching even its darkest moments with a deft and often sly hand. The band’s personal dynamic shines through in songs wielding humor as a balm: Wright’s song about her estrangement from her religious family nods to The Righteous Gemstones with its title “Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers,” while “Going For The Garbage Plate” namechecks an infamous Rochester junk food staple as a metaphor for remaining susceptible to depressive episodes. At times, Cliffdiver uses two approaches at once: In more frantic moments Duffy and Wright’s vocals can weave together or rail against each other, equally symbolizing the furious internal dialogue of an anxious person or the cathartic purge of getting out of your own head, and out of your own way.

By Duffy’s estimation, Cliffdiver have learned to approach these stories with a different perspective. No longer simply introspective, the songs on birdwatching are a dizzying array of references, of moments big and small, old wounds alongside brand new awakenings. Lead single “Dayz Gone” is an anthemic banger, Wright howling about the banalities of tour life. “Black Lodge Breakfast Burrito (Limited Time Only)” is another cheeky title for a song processing the more insidious ways mental health issues creep on you. “I wanted to stop talking about what’s wrong with us,” Wright explains. “I wanted to find out what happens after you’ve done all your introspection and kicked some addictions. A yearning to move past your shit. A yearning to feel good enough for other people.” Sometimes that takes the form of Duffy and Wright calling themselves and their own behaviors out. Elsewhere, it manifests in songs like “Lord Have Mercer,” a revenge fantasy directed at past abusers from different band members’ lives.

birdwatching refuses to tie a neat bow on a narrative like Exercise Your Demons did. When a friend heard album closer “I Reckon You Might Could I S’Pose,” they told Duffy they were surprised: Cliffdiver usually tried to end on a more triumphant note. But the song — mulling on the dangers of nostalgia culture, and hiding away in the past being afraid of the future — resonates with all the snapshots presented across the album. From its earliest moments, too, birdwatching doesn’t promise to have all the answers. Quite the opposite, actually: In an opener hilariously titled “Thirty, Flirty, And Thriving!!!” Duffy and Wright join their voices to sing about having turned thirty and not knowing shit, and the fact that they won’t know shit by forty, either.

None of this is about defeat. It’s about small scale revelations. “The album is a more mature take on what hope is,” Wright says. “Hope for me is knowing shit can be managed.”

birdwatching isn’t the sound of everything getting better. It’s a real life take: Things get better, but they also get worse again, and better again, and worse again, and nobody will ever have it all figured out. In each snapshot, Cliffdiver offers a companion for those ups and downs.

“We can make changes for the better so it doesn’t hurt as bad as it used to,” Duffy concludes. “Once we realize we’re not the only ones that feel this way, you can say: Maybe the system is fucked, and maybe we’re all fucked — but we’re not alone.”

Casper Fight Scene

Hailing from the upper peninsula of Michigan, The Casper Fight Scene possess the trademark loud guitars, catchy hooks, and earnest lyrics of emo with their own unique flair. Frontman Jason Swallow’s lyrics touch on past regrets and a palpable fear of stagnation while still holding out hope for the future and a willingness to change. From unbridled, angry, and cathartic whales on “Cadillac Death Trap” to crestfallen, meager mumbles of “Geezer” the emotions on display are diverse, direct, and vulnerable. Their earnest recounting of uncomfortable truths and former mistakes make The Casper Fight Scene humble and lovable. Combine that with the soaring leads, epic solos, and all-around top tier shredding from guitarist Kenny Quick, and the rock solid rhythm section of drummer Michael McGaffigan and bassist Peter Hart, and you have a dangerously charismatic band poised to become the next Midwest emo darlings.,

Leisure Hour

“Everyone you love will end up dead,” Isaiah Neal sings on “Ivy Tech,” the second track from Leisure Hour’s upcoming The Sunny Side. It’s a matter-of-fact lyrics delivered in a matter-of-fact way––but a second later, Grace Dudas and Raegan Gordon join in to harmonize on a booming “whoa-oh-oh-oh” chorus. In the span of about three seconds, Leisure Hour’s whole ethos becomes clear. The Sunny Side is the result of years of writing and recording, the culmination of a half-decade of lineup changes; by now, Leisure Hour’s reached their final form: bassist/vocalist Dudas, guitarist/vocalist Neal, and drummer/vocalist Gordon.

The Sunny Side, according to the band, is about “love, loss, and struggle with mental health as a middle class individual,” and maybe it was a case of life mimicking art. The three of them struggled to come up with enough money to record and produce these songs the way they envisioned; they picked up extra shifts at their jobs and, in true DIY fashion, decided to throw as many music festivals as they could to drum up enough cash to bring these songs to life, and “the community around us rallied together to make this album happen, and for that we are eternally grateful.”

That gratitude is the driving force behind The Sunny Side. The eleven songs that comprise the record are built on shaky hopes and the anticipation of disappointment, but along with that comes a teeth-gritting resilience and a hard-won appreciation for those small victories. “I can’t forgive you,” Dudas sings at the end of “Forgiveness,” but she follows it quickly with “But I’m trying to,” and then she repeats it over and over. Maybe she’s just trying to convince herself, but it’s the effort that matters. Leisure Hour won’t stop looking on the sunny side anytime soon, and they’re trying their damnedest to convince you to do the same.