Merchandise: Friday, Oct. 3

Merchandise is not a punk band. The orchestral swells and chiming acoustic guitars that welcome listeners to new album After the End should make that obvious. But the Internet hype machine continues to perpetuate the notion that the Tampa quartet is some shiny trinket clutched tightly by a music scene too extreme to properly claim ownership of the group's romantic, outsized ambitions. With an aesthetic planted firmly in the kind of saccharine '80s radio pop that punks of the era would have probably kicked your ass for listening to, one may still wonder when the band chose to defect from the chaos and embrace the pristine.

"I've put out almost 40 records, and all of them have been fucked-up, destroyed music," says vocalist Carson Cox. "I like aggressive, distorted shit. I like romantic music. I like classical music. At a certain point, you start going through the motions of making fucked-up music and that's not really a challenge anymore. I wanted to make something that was a little denser but not hide everything in the music—something that was clear-sounding with good ideas behind it.”  

After touring with Thurston Moore's sludge-punk project Chelsea Light Moving, Merchandise attracted the attention of 4AD, the luminary post-punk label known best for the Pixies, Cocteau Twins and Modern English's fop-pop megahit "I Melt With You." This promotion would handily explain the shift from the taut, elongated shoegaze of 2013's Total Nite to the dapper balladry of After the End. But Cox was quick to dispel the assertion that the style change was the product of ascending from dingy basements to more formal venues.  

"First of all, there are no basements in Florida," he says. "I can't say there's a message or any kind of pretension with how we produced and wrote this one. It came about sounding the way it does because we were playing all these shows and a lot of our songs were 12 minutes long, which sucks because you can only play four of them and if people aren't feeling it after four minutes, there's still another eight minutes to get through. I just wanted to write shorter songs and more concise ideas that were collected better."

When the reverb trail clears and the bells cease their shimmering, the genre-hopping comes off less as a pastiche and more as a tasteful curation not unlike the fabled C86 comp, the jangle-pop touchstone After the End most clearly belongs in. The fact that Merchandise could record such an inspired tribute in a D.I.Y. fashion calls the heel-dragging of punk's sonic ambitions into question. But Cox still thinks we're years away from experiencing a true revolution at the hands of commercial technology.

"We should be living through a cultural renaissance, and instead we're in a cultural depression," he says. "Technology is available to everyone, and nobody is doing anything with it except for taking pictures of their ass. There should be a surplus of creativity, and I think it's slowly happening, but people need to put down their phone and do something interesting as opposed to whatever the fuck it is they're doing. Where's the poetry? Where's the voice of God? Where are all these things that exist in classical art that should be coming back in this insane way but haven't yet because my generation sucks?"

SEE IT: Merchandise plays Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., with Lower and Arctic Flowers, on Friday, Oct. 3. 9 pm. $12. 21+

WWeek 2015