Total Downer
CARETAKER

January 27, 2023
(Just Because Records)

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For Total Downer, the Cleveland-based power-pop band spearheaded by Andy Schumann, friendship is everything. After linking up with Arfil Pajarillaga, Clay Reid, and Dante Foley, the shape of the band’s debut album Caretaker emerged. As performers and songwriters, Total Downer unleashes a combination of anthemic celebrations and cathartic yelling, juxtaposing thankfulness and grief for the people they love. To aid in this effort, Schumann workshopped his lyrics with Denise Zhou and Bella Olivo, two of his closest artistic confidants. Their edits helped underscore Total Downer’s mission: to release tender music that’s true to experience. That mandate is twofold: the stories they tell, and encourage their peers to tell, reckon with their sexualities, genders, and notions of death and home. From there, Total Downer wants to provide listeners with new frameworks to approach their own experiences. As Schumann elaborates: “I especially try to write the songs that I feel I could have really used as a younger person.”

With Caretaker, Total Downer takes that goal to write tender, truthful rippers to heart. Take, for example, “Star Rek’t,” where Schumann responds to Pinkerton. An ostensibly relatable record hinting at personal sexual shame and discomfort but whose lyrical preoccupations with racist, homophobic, and sexist stereotypes, Pinkerton doesn’t resonate with Schumann. He instead follows the lead of Billie Eilish, elaborating how compulsory consumption of pornography at a young age made him genuinely fearful of his own sexuality. He yearned for tenderness and mutual pleasure above all else. On “Star Rek’t,” Schumann writes a song naming these demons and thanking the people in his life who’ve expressed and helped him express love and tenderness. He wrote just the song he needed to hear when he was younger.

On Caretaker, Schumann condenses his typically verbose songwriting into a punchier, poppier style; track times hovering around two minutes each. Over 13 songs, Total Downer expands on their emo, punk, and power-pop stylistic foundation to incorporate the wit of 2nd Grade, the catchiness of Charly Bliss, and the tenderness of illuminati hotties. Schumann elaborates: “We make music to grieve and dance to.” Total Downer puts words to experiences few know how, and even fewer will touch. Album opener “Stupid Smile” mourns childhood sexual trauma, attempting to reckon with an adult figure who he and his community admired but betrayed that trust. Then there’s “Big Mouth,” calling upon sex pests to own up to their responsibility. In the same breath, the band calls out the mainstream porn industry for reinforcing a noncommunicative, coercive paradigm of intimacy. Or take “Cruel,” a propulsive jam where Schumann laments the cycle of abandonment and gentrification in Cleveland, where he, his family, and his neighbors are increasingly priced out. The band is righteously angry. At the same time, they make room to mourn what’s lost when the forces of capital descend upon our communities.

While the album has no lone message, many songs on Caretaker center around a fantasy where Schumann has the ability to heal the world’s pain, to save his friends and celebrities from the structures that could ever hurt them, and to take revenge on anyone who stands in the path of happiness and justice. Take album closer “Luis,” a track that started off as a silly ode to a roommate that evolved into one yearning for emotional intimacy with the homies. The track closes with an elegy to Schumann’s closest collaborator, Nico Chiobi, who died suddenly at the end of 2020. Schumann envisioned he would spend the rest of his life sharing the stage with Nico, and their death nearly spelled the end of Total Downer. 

On the heavy but endearing track “Taylor Lautner,” Total Downer grapples with body image. They construct a revenge fantasy where Schumann and Lautner beat up the entertainment executives who pressured him to maintain and bear his chiseled physique so much at the tender age of 18. The band’s empathy shines through, making clear how imaginative power-pop can be a force for good without sacrificing artistic quality. 

In true power pop fashion, Total Downer speaks on coming of age, disillusionment, and resistance with wit and urgency. On “Dr. Phil,” Schumann begs the dubious TV therapist for help as he struggles to forge a path ahead while remaining the justice-oriented person he wants to be. Then on “Dolly Parton,” the East Tennessee heroine is the smiley stand-in for the wealthy upper crust. The band breaks through their own celebrity worship to call out the brightest stars for their defense of class interests. And on “Big Man,” Total Downer delivers a labor anthem for the 21st century, condemning the self-righteous bosses we’ve all encountered who are little more than self-aggrandizing bloodsuckers.

To bring Caretaker to life, the band recorded with Jacob Kirkwood (ITEM, Napsack) at Cleveland’s Superior Sound. Bandmate Clay Reid mixed the record, and Tom Woodhead (Gold Panda, FIDLAR) mastered it. Total Downer is Andy Schumann, Arfil Pajarillaga, Clay Reid, and Dante Foley of Mourning [A] BLKstar. Caretaker reaches airwaves on January 27th, 2023 via Cleveland indie archivists Just Because Records (Suitor, Machine Go Boom).

Total Downer On Tour

For more information, please contact:
Eric Bennett
eric@luckybirdmedia.com