Twenty One Pilots - Clancy (and the saga of Trench)

What if all you knew was that the new Twenty One Pilots album Clancy was the 4th and final album of a large story? You don't read wikis or fan forums or watch music videos or really know more than a few songs, enough to get the gist of the band and their love of genre hopping. Could you piece together any sort of coherent plot just by listening to all 4 albums? I have my doubts.

Having said that, I love these guys, and I'm willing to trudge through 6 records worth of deep textual/image analysis to at the very least figure out what is or isn't understandable. I mean, it can't be nearly as difficult as Coheed & Cambria. I've read the comics and I still can't figure out which level of inception most of their songs take place in. Blurryface and Trench and a dragon and Clancy can't possibly be that obtuse. Sure, it might take a while, and I might go crazy in the process, but it's all specifically Tyler Joseph working through his own millennial angst in a creative way. Twenty One Pilots is the metaphor for personal accountability and choosing to do the right thing no matter how difficult or unprofitable it is. It's nice that Tyler says all of it is open to interpretation, but I was gonna do that anyway.

First things first, gotta just listen to all 4 in order. Please excuse me while that takes 3+ hours....

K, so when you're dealing with a concept it's best to start with the largest possible level: where do we start, where do we end up? Whatever that journey is, it happens inside whatever the title refers to. We start with an infestation in his imagination and a fear of death. We end up with 2 faces, "blurry" is the one he's not, but he needs help to get "blurryface" out of his head. That seems pretty straightforward, everything in the middle is some kind of mental fight between Blurryface and the face that isn't Blurryface. Not much of a stretch to say Blurryface is the name for giving in to all your fears and doubts and insecurities and losing the battle for your own sanity; the album is basically Golem arguing with himself about guiding Frodo through Mordor.

That's the shape of the story, now we just need to figure out which character is doing/saying what at any given moment. Pronouns help. There's an "i" (possibly two if both faces get to flaunt their microphone techniques), a "she", and a "you." So, we have 4 characters: Blurryface, Mr. Misty Eye, a girl, and me the listener (we break the 4th wall because your old pal Bottle is literally the person who hears him ask for help, and he breaks the 4th wall by commenting on the album as he makes it). My job is to figure out which face is the narrator and which face is Blurryface; I'm "the Judge." 

Ah crap, there's "bishops" too, so we're in some kind of chess game slash complex socio-political caste system with religious overtones. This is rapidly turning into something a lot more complex than the simple "sad boi" album i thought i was getting myself into.

"WELCOME TO TRENCH!"

Damnit. Welp, it's my own fault for thinking too much, but at least we know where we are now. Trench is the bench with the unhelpful partition that prevents bums from getting a decent night's sleep. 

Where do we start, where do we end, and what kind of yahoos do I have to deal with?

Put on your jumpsuit and levitate 'cause we're about to battle Nico. Not a huge surprise, Blurryface is Nicolas Bourbaki. The other face is still a mystery, though, because he'll morph to someone else so Nico can't catch him.

Smithereens is another fun 4th wall wrecking ball. She must be Tyler's wife. Remember, this is all just a story about dealing with real life insecurities and mental health; these internal tracks are all wrestling with Nico. He keeps fighting, he's getting really beat up, but he created this world so he can destroy it if he wants to. "Sahlo folina" is a thing we'd have to look up, so it just has some relevance to going all in like "geronimo" or "bombs away." But, then the realization that the person whose name is his middle name will not live to see this record come out knocks him down for good and us Banditos end the album all staring at each other waiting for the relapse to take him away.

Ug, that brings us to the "quarantine's over" album, Scaled & Icy. Nobody actually likes this album at face value. I gave it 2 chances, and even though it makes total sense for the story, I'm dreading a 3rd or [shudder] 10th listen.

It's a blatant "shows over, back to work with a fake smile on your face" album that just oozes with the bad kind of sarcastic puss from your flesh wounds. But listen to it I must. Maybe something more relevant will appear.

Technical aside: you may have heard that the title is an anagram, but at no point in the previous albums do we get a name for the real protagonist; that's extracurricular information. This first listen we have to assume Trench is over, he lost the battle and desperately needs to cross the Mexican border. Until we get some lyrical indication otherwise, this is just the Twenty One Pilots "quarantine album."

Blech, nope there's nothing here but cheesy Pop EDM and ignoring how messed up everything actually is. About the only thing you can say is that this is a complete reversal of everything Twenty One Pilots has ever been saying: ignore the oppression, stop taking your meds, run away from your problems, party on Sarturday! This is what shipping the defective parts out and letting all 21 of those pilots die a fiery tragic death sounds like. He sure woke up, went out, and made a lot of money.

Now, of course, we have the new final album of the saga, it's called Clancy, but 3 years is a long wait to sit and worry he might totally GRRM the whole thing. Of course he wouldn't, that's the whole Frodo didn't get eaten by Shelob and Gandalf defeated the Balrog and got promoted from Gray to White thing, but we were seriously just expected to sit there for 3 years waiting on a plot point.

Spoiler alert, Clancy is a more than suitably awesome culmination of this now decade long project, but it better have been, right? Talk about upping the pressure on yourself. You end Trench afraid of your own fan base idolizing you because you know you'll screw it up, write a disgusting Trash the Magic Dragon album that ends with trying to decide whether or not to clean your house before you kill yourself, and then just chill for a while before the next tour/album cycle. I am Bottle, from one imaginary ego to another, you got some adamantium testicles my friend.

And it's at this point we can finally drop the pretense that we don't know the story. We have to know the story because he's Clancy and he's back in Trench with the new power of not being afraid to overcompensate. That implies he wasn't in Trench for the last album (i.e. not battling Nico, the person who cares what he thinks). Time to wander the hallways of your imagination and notice that while the cycle never actually ends, the painful parts hurt a little less each time you revisit them. 

10 years, 4 albums, push on through, it gets better. Trust me, it sounds much less underwhelming the way he sings it.

Actually, I'm surprised. You really can get the basic gist of the story by only listening to the albums. If you want the 4 minute condensed version with all the missing details you can go watch I Am Clancy on the youbamatube (like i did before writing this paragraph), but the structure is totally coherent whether they mapped it out from the start or made it up as they went along.

Please unrecline your seats and put your tray tables in their upright and locked position. Thanks for flying Bottle Air. Flight adjourned.