Happy Birthday do more than wear their whines on their sleeves, they fashion this contemporary angst into a long sash of boldly glowing merit badges; and these eleven tracks collecting rebuffs and anxieties, as life continues relentlessly to deform into a perplexed string of events, offers only episodes of rejection by everything desired. Adorned with a fractured musical note on their self-titled debut’s album cover, the tales of heartbreak mostly range between three and four minutes and always gather toward the passive solution of constant self-reflection, a closure-less exercise due to the truth that each song carries on the same forlorn themes of the previous.

But Happy Birthday never abandon the search and persevere by this persistence to document disappointed interactions with a significant-other for thirty three minutes, earnestly singing lyrics like “She was the girl that you wanted so bad / She was the girl that you really couldn’t have” on the song “Maxine the Teenage Eskimo,” where even in such remote environments as a tundra landscape rejection is an inescapable situation. This extreme display of hopelessness adequately persuades that Happy Birthday’s territory transpires at a heightened concentration of goofy extremes, with their voices distorted into whines pining and pining away, a tambourine or little synth tweaks sealing in the cracks, and the unpredictable punk sludge track called “Zit” where they shout “Now I want to break shit / Don’t want to make shit / Just want to waste it.” With the spectrum so vast, the display of pop punk roots acts as a pseudo-history lesson. Each track touches on another strand of growth: there’s an acoustic number, one that belongs on summer AM, “2 Shy” sounds ripped from Weezer’s formula for The Blue Album, and there are tracks bordering on Ben Weasel terrain, sections of bona fide grunge sans feedback, and the synth twee “Subliminal Message” that I shit you not will end up on a ton of future mix-tapes given by bashful individuals. Whether you’ll genuinely appreciate the vintage is a matter of personal evaluation.