“‘B.F.G.F.’: When Eve 6 Made a Kind-of Understandable Stab at a Radio Hit on a Comeback Album”

Now, I’m kind of a dunce for writing this article, since in general my typical mission is to praise this band and try to highlight all of their underrated tracks and strengths that go unheralded by a dourly callous media. These, by and large, centralize themselves within the band’s third album, It’s All in Your Head (2003). I have to admit: even I said that there’s no way this new Eve 6 album could be good, when this thing dropped, and I was maybe a little bit burned out on the pop/punk aesthetic, as were a lot of people, perhaps. Truth be told, though, this record is probably the best thing the band ever did, and “At Least We’re Dreaming”; “Good Lives” and “Friend of Mine” are probably better than any songs on the first two albums not titled “Inside out.”

But I’m not about to sell the world on pop/punk at this point so I might as well focus on a little phenomenon known as the “stab at a commercial hit.” In regards to this malady, and/or the malady which would lead to such a degraded motive (namely poverty), there was just an amusing little bit on Eve 6’s Instagram account, presumably the product of singer and founding member Max Collins, along the lines of “My parents were very supportive of my interest in music as a kind and sometimes I wish they hadn’t been… if my dad had been that trope of an a**hole father who demanded that I… pursue a career in business I’d probably have dental insurance right now.”

So there it is, right from the horse’s mouth. Our alt-rock heroes from the ’90s, benefactors of the phrase “tender heart in a blender” (which was then lifted by Limp Bizkit for “Nookie” all of two years later), aren’t flossing in Bentleys and eating oysters downtown and… they don’t even have dental insurance.

Hopefully, in light of this, you’ll cut them a little more slack for “B.F.G.F.,” which, to be honest, isn’t a terrible song by any stretch, but does smack of commercial ambition, with its simple, repetitious chorus and banal, sexual lyrical theme. Now, the latter of these, I’d say, seems even more foreign than the former, as this band was always prone to writing catchy, hummable songs, and so for this reason was, for me, the dead giveaway (in particular, Collins singing the words “get it on” sounds about as natural as Beyonce issuing a simile). Of course, in a sense, it is a tree falling in the middle of the forest, anyway, and no Speak in Code probably isn’t a strong enough record to warrant any ire over its lack of exposure, though it is generally listenable and probably a little underrated, hardly deserving of the nuclear-wasteland treatment it seem to get by our culture. On an even more bizarre note, this band is still putting out music and has issued an EP and an LP, both this decade, to no response, let alone press or acclaim. In general, as regards the press’ handling of these guys, there’s an overwhelming “Inside out” favoritism at work, and a kind of foregone conclusion that their self-titled debut is their strongest album, when really it’s possible that it’s their worst, and the world overlooks all of their subsequent work as disposable, almost as a sort of sadistic practicle joke. But ya know, what else is new?

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