Sorry Eric – The Problem With Fun LP

What our staff has to say: “Honestly how does a record this good get made??? Sorry Eric – The Problem with fun is the perfect driving the car record, it’s the perfect laying in your bed and staring at the ceiling record, it’s easy to say that is just a perfect record. Eric checks all the marks for a songwriter driver album, Genuinely honest, fun and not a sense of taking oneself too seriously. I think since release I have listened to this over 20 times. FFO New Zealand Rockers The Clean, The Bats, ETC. Favorite Tracks : Anything’s Possible When You Lie and My Slowly Dying Brain.” – Dan

This is a pre-order and will ship the first week of October!

Over the past handful of years, Sorry, Eric has been quietly refining its take on Ohio post-punk. Led by deadpan, incisive songwriter and vocalist Eric Dietrich, and featuring Christina Cahalane on drums, Brian McCabe on Bass, and Nick Ruma on guitar, the band oscillates between the vulnerable and the biting, all the while throwing hooks in each observance. Their upcoming LP The Problem With Fun is the opposite of candy-coating, often summoning up pleasant existential aphorisms only to unmask them as untruths. This sandpaper truth-telling has been partially brought on by the COVID-19 crisis – where people were told things were okay, that they should just get jobs, that enthusiasm was warranted. We know differently. Thus “The Problem With Fun” – what makes you feel good may eventually fuck you up, and – despite our best attempts – eventually fucked up we will be.

Notwithstanding its title, The Problem With Fun is actually…fun? The album opens with tinkling synthesizers before Eric’s vocals come in, harmonizing alongside vocalist/drummer Christina Cahalane – “Whenever I feel myself give way, I remind myself it’s just more of the same – waiting for you to be less lame, waiting for you to say ‘You got a problem with fun. You got a problem to suffer.” Soaring, dissonant guitar emerges. Drums maintain steady, eager rhythm. The band’s unique blend of sardonic humor and driving earworms is at its high watermark.

Though the album’s darkness is sometimes padded by turn of phrase and nonchalance, it’s still darkness. Take the melancholy ballad “Bones,” with its gentle, melodic guitar, organ tones, and light drumming. Dietrich rattles off a number of commonly held soothsaid misbeliefs -”that we’ll make it,” “we deserve it,” “that we’ll never die. Plainspoken and evocative, Dietrich muses on death, misery, and inevitability until its tenderly morbid send off – “may his bones be crushed so long as it’s easy for you and for me, too.” The Problem With Fun pulls no punches, but it finds beauty and reward in suffering or at least in facing fear and life head on.

– Jordan Reyes (American Dreams Records, ONO)