Remember career day? That day when you would get a break from the normal curriculum of your classes and instead a bunch of strangers would come to the school and give bumbling presentations about what they do for a living?
Yeah, those were weird. And pretty underwhelming. A parade of police officers and accountants, straining to impress you, a middle schooler, and assure you of how important and fulfilling their jobs are. Premises contradicted by essentially every other fact they told you about the circumstances of their employment.
I remember we had a national security contractor visit us one year. He at one point informed the class that we shouldn’t be worried about all the information that the government was collecting on us and our parents (this was right after 9/11) because the government had no idea what to do with most of that data.
Even as a child, I found this revelation chilling, and it only becomes more alarming with age. The best presentation I can recall was by a cartoonist who came to my class to talk about his work with a local newspaper. He couldn’t exactly explain what he did or how he landed in his role with the newspaper, but he did draw a pretty amusing caricature of Jessi Ventura (then governor of Minnesota), which was cool.
I’ve heard of schools in hip places like New York inviting local bands to their career days to talk to students about their lives and work. This never happened where I was from. “Musician” was never seen as a viable career path by any adult I knew growing up (cartoonist, on the other hand! Set your goals and aim high, kiddos!).
Today, it’s becoming increasingly rare to find a musician who makes their living solely writing and performing original music, but if you’re one of the lucky ones who can solve that logistical Rubik’s cube, the least you can do is share the secrets of your good fortune with some impressionable junior-high kids. It’s easier to do than ever too, now that everything is over Zoom (you won’t even have to leave your combo studio/bedroom/label warehouse to do it!)
Educating the youth of tomorrow is certainly something for Queens emo revivalists Career Day to think about (they’re called Career Day, after all). Although, I’m not sure what they could instruct the children in other than heartache.
Career Day play a slacker-championing brand of mid-west-inspired emo that has been nourished by long drives upstate with Cap’n Jazz tapes whirling on repeat in the cassette deck of a rusted sedan. Buzzy, dive-bombing riffs that pull up just in time to avoid drowning in a sea of grief.
The whole project is woven together into a coherent assemblage by singer Desmond Zantua vocals, which manage to capture the nervous flow of Garrett Klahn’s lilt and combine it with the subtle, momentous lurch of Bob Nanna’s hard, melo-punk purr.
Tab open a Pabst; crack the window open hair; light a clove cigarette; put your feet up on the kitchen table, and take some time to think about your life this afternoon. Maybe you’ll realize that it won’t get any better than where you’re at now, and you better just enjoy it while you can, or maybe you’ll conclude that you need to make some changes for the better in 2021. Either way, Career Day can be your soundtrack for reverie and reflection today.
You can stream the entirety of Career Day’s new EP Pride Was Somewhere Else below via Bandcamp:
Follow Career Day on Facebook here.
