video review: 'you're not as _____ as you think' by sorority noise

I can't be the only one who is a little surprised that of the emo revival records I've covered (and that's precious few indeed), the first out of the gate is deconstructionist. Huh, looks like my audience knows me.

Anyway, before I get back to the schedule we're going to be taking a little detour on a special collab I've got coming up, so stay tuned!

album review: 'you're not as _____ as you think' by sorority noise

So I probably should have covered this band earlier. Indeed, if you were to look at my past few years of music reviews, an in-the-know follower would spot there's a considerable hole in my reviews, a subgenre that has experienced quite the critical revival that I haven't covered. 

And that subgenre is emo - and yes, I'm referring to the musical subgenre that broke off from hardcore punk and post-hardcore in the early 90s, not the overwrought aesthetic that was beaten into the ground in the mid-to-late 2000s. Now as I mentioned in my Falling In Reverse review, my knowledge of post-hardcore is a little more lacking than I'd prefer to admit, and as such I was exposed to emo music like the majority of people were: through the mainstream crossovers. Oh, I know there were some people who were on the ground floor for Rites Of Spring or Jawbreaker, but I got exposed to it most when I started hearing Jimmy Eat World and then the more theatrical bent that came a few years later - which, if I'm being brutally honest, I tended to like more. From there I took in a lot of the mid-2000s scene with my general liking for Say Anything and I've made some inroads into back catalogs whenever pop punk adjacent to the subgenre gets covered, but when I heard about the emo revival from acts like Touche Amore or The Hotelier or The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die... well, I just wasn't interested. And that's not a judgement on quality, believe it or not - there was just other stuff I'd prefer to talk about and explore, trying to plug as many of my other knowledge gaps like electronic music and black metal.

That said, when I have found the time to listen to more of the emo revival, I've found acts I like, which takes us to Sorority Noise. Thanks to Patreon they wound up on my schedule and going through their first two albums, I found a lot to like - they had a good knack for hooks, some modestly clever and honest writing, and there was real progression from their debut Forgettable to their more melancholic but more tuneful and refined Joy, Departed in 2015. As such, I had every reason to think I'd probably like their newest album You're Not As _____ As you Think, especially if the confessional honesty hit some interesting new places and the tunes were as strong. So, what did we get?

video review: 'integrity blues' by jimmy eat world

And that's two for tonight. Whew, this went down a lot easier than I expecting, really quite pleased with it too. Did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did, that's for sure...

And next up, Tove Lo and... well, this Avenged Sevenfold record is bound to be interesting, I suppose... stay tuned!

album review: 'integrity blues' by jimmy eat world

Of the albums I was expecting that I'd eventually cover this year, a new record from Jimmy Eat World was not one of them.

And to be completely honest, I'm not entirely sure why that is, probably not helped that I'm pretty divided on the group as a whole. I've always considered the band something of a mess of contradictions: the lyrics treading right up to the line of emo with frontman Jim Adkins tending to underplay his delivery... paired with instrumentation that went straight for power pop and never turned back, most of which led to songs that had swell and impact instrumentally but weren't always well matched by their content. It was always a balancing act for me with Jimmy Eat World - at their best, they hit anthemic rock beats that could match the broader scope of their writing, or managed to precisely nail a sweet spot that would make them influential in emo throughout the next decade. 

Granted, by emo standards Jimmy Eat World were never great songwriters - Say Anything never had anything to worry about - which is why I tended to like their more anthemic stabs like Futures and Chase The Light a fair bit more than most, and am willing to forgive some parts of Invented. But 2013's Damage was a frustrating listen, an attempt to go 'back to basics' with their scope and sound, and ditching Mark Trombino's production to do it left with middling results at best - not a bad album, but certainly not one anybody remembered. But there's a part of me that was kind of curious about their album this year Integrity Blues, mostly because they were working with Justin Meldel-Johnsen on production - and even though I've definitely come down hard on his production work in the past, he has injected more personality into his work and that could be a good fit for Jimmy Eat World, who as a band I've always thought could use a little more flash. So okay, how as Integrity Blues?

video review: 'every open eye' by CHVRCHES

Wow, this was a ton of fun. Definitely recommending this, just so much energy and heart to this record, so easy to like!

Next up... see, I'm considering Silversun Pickups, but that album is driving off the wall... so I think I'll do Kurt Vile instead. Stay tuned!

album review: 'every open eye' by CHVRCHES

For me, this is one of the big ones.

See, I didn't expect much when I first planned to cover the debut album from Chvrches back in 2013. I had heard the gleaming, early-80s synthpop with gleaming high synths against spiky drum machines and distorted beats that seemed to careen off of modern indie pop on the strident vocals of Lauren Mayberry and while I suspected I'd like it, I didn't know how much. And yet at the end of 2013, The Bones of What You Believe landed on my year-end list, mostly buoyed by surprisingly tight songwriting and thematic cohesion.

Fast forward to now and the highly anticipated sophomore follow-up to that synthpop heavy-hitter... but let's be honest here, Chvrches is stepping onto a different playing field. While there were a fair share of releases inspired by 80s synthpop that dropped in 2013, the past year has given us a huge cross-section of synthesizer-driven indie pop, and with the success of Taylor Swift's 1989 and 'Shut Up And Dance' by Walk The Moon, you could argue it's gone outright mainstream. And that's before we even take into account the indie scene, where acts like Lower Dens and The Wombats have released some of the strongest records of the year and others like Metric or even Carly Rae Jepsen aren't far behind. And sure, Chvrches being great songwriters gave them an advantage, but I was curious to see how they could push their sound in a fresh direction that'd enable them to stand out, especially after a few years of intense touring. Did they pull it off on Every Open Eye?

video review: 'copper gone' by sage francis

Holy shit, this album was fantastic. Definitely worth many a listen, and while it's a little late, I was happy I had the chance to really dig in and dissect this album.

Next up... hmm, not sure. Stay tuned all the same!

album review: 'copper gone' by sage francis

Let's talk about emo rap.

It's a term that's used with a lot more denigration and scorn than it really deserves, because it highlights the acceptance of the toxic posturing that can exasperate me with mainstream hip-hop and how honesty and authenticity are often less and less viable. Because let's be honest, it's a lot easier to write rap about the traditional 'cash money hoes' topics than actually dig deep and expose vulnerability and feelings and confessional subject matter. And almost paradoxically, I have a lot more respect for rappers who are willing to put themselves out there and expose those deeper emotions

And the mainstream has had a very complicated relationship with this sort of material, especially in recent years. Many would point of Kanye West's excellent 808s & Heartbreaks that strongly influenced acts like Drake or Childish Gambino, or would go a little further back and point to Eminem's artistic suicide on the much-maligned Encore, but to some extent these acts have retrofitted something from the underground that has been more open to this sort of confessional songwriting. And let me stress, I think it's a good thing that there are more mainstream rappers who are willing to approach this 'softening' of hip-hop culture, but I knew it'd only be a matter of time before an established heavyweight from the underground would step up to the plate.

Enter Sage Francis, rapper and spoken word poet and widely hailed as one of the 'godfathers' of emo rap, a term to which he's mostly ambivalent. Starting in the late 90s, he smashed into the underground scene with a succession of extremely solid records throughout the 2000s, with my favourite probably being Human The Death Dance in 2007. And what I loved about Sage Francis wasn't just his layered yet very understandable wordplay, his willingness to tell many stories beyond his own and comment on society as a whole, and his rich collection of uniquely textured and slightly off-beat instrumentals, but the fact that he was an impressive rapper none the less. Sure, he was willing to show his emotions and write how he felt, exposing his own flaws and failures which always rang as genuine, but you could never mess with him as a rapper. 

But after the indie rock-inspired album Li(f)e in 2010, Sage Francis announced he was going on hiatus and after a mixtape release last year, he's back with a full album this year - was it worth the wait?

video review: 'hebrews' by say anything

Believe it or not, this album took a lot of effort to decode and figure out. In the end, mostly ambivalent on it, but there were pieces that worked.

And now... ugh, let's get Linkin Park and Lana Del Rey over with. This is going to piss so many people off... but until then, stay tuned!

album review: 'hebrews' by say anything

About a year ago, just about a month before I converted my blog to videos, I took a request to do a retrospective review of In Defense Of The Genre by Say Anything. Widely heralded as one of the strongest emo bands to break in the 2000s, Say Anything rode the tremendous success of ...Is A Real Boy into their 2007 release, an overloaded, messy, and thoroughly interesting record co-opting every variant and subgenre of emo music popular at the time and throwing it in our faces. It was ambitious, swollen with collaborators, and while I'd argue it didn't really work as a cohesive whole, it was still compelling and definitely worth a listen.

But ever since that one-two punch from the mid-2000s, I've had the frustrating feeling that Say Anything might be falling into a holding pattern, The band has long ago stopped being a traditional punk act, to the point where their 2012 release Anarchy, My Dear felt distinctly underwhelming as the band attempted to recreate the visceral emotions that fueled ...Is A Real Boy to very mixed results. And when I heard that Say Anything was following it up with another collaborator-overloaded album this year titled Hebrews, I had to restrain my desire to groan with exasperation. Unlike some fans, I didn't hate Anarchy, My Dear, but my issue was that it felt distinctly neutered and lacking in dramatic force compared to Say Anything's best work, especially considering that they were trying to make a punk record and yet sounded more tame and reserved than ever before.

And when I heard that not only was Hebrews going to be filled with collaborators, but that there would also be no guitars on the album, with the melody lines entirely replaced by strings arrangements and keyboards... well, I'm in favour of bands experimenting, so out of sheer curiosity, I took a look at the album. Was it as bad as I feared?

album review: 'in defense of the genre' by say anything (RETRO REVIEW)

I have to be honest, it's not often I do real 'retro reviews', and there's a very good reason for that. As much as I could go on and on about certain acts and how much I like their material, I feel that without the appropriate context/situation, there's isn't much of a point for me to talk about these acts. It'd be rather self-indulgent, and while I don't exactly have a huge problem with that, I'd prefer to actually talk about something that is relevant to the conversation today.

Now that's not saying I won't do retrospective reviews - far from it, actually. In fact, I think I can definitively nail down three reasons why I would do a retro review of an album or a movie: it relates to a current subject in a direct manner that allows me to fuse the review with an essay; it's something I didn't get a chance to cover earlier in the year and I want to cover it so I'm prepared when year-end rolls around; and finally, on request (and even then it's iffy, because there are some acts I will refuse to touch on principle).

And even with that, I haven't written that many retrospective reviews. There were the Nolan-Batman retrospectives (here and here), the reviews of James Blake and Tegan & Sara earlier this year (the latter of which I remember most for my essay on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope), and the two reviews I've written on request: that of Avenged Sevenfold's self-titled album and that of an album by The Beards. Completely unsurprisingly, the two albums I reviewed on request were not even close to good, which makes sense in a twisted sort of way. After all, the Internet likes to give critics shit to review so we can fly into highly entertaining rages.

I want you all to understand that to clarify that when I got the request to review In Defense of the Genre, the collaborator-studded album by Say Anything, I stepped in with high hopes but extremely low expectations. As a band with no real pop success to speak of - albeit some measure of critical acclaim, but that can mean anything these days - I had actually never heard any of this band's material before beginning this review. Keep in mind that when I started listening to the pop-punk and emo music of the 2000s, I jumped onto the bandwagon in 2007, which was in the peak of mainstream success but not critical acclaim (as I've said before, I spent the majority of the mid-2000s listening to power and symphonic metal). I might have been listening to Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco and the occasional MCR or Jimmy Eat World track, but I certainly wasn't familiar with the more underground segments of the genre, so I was very unfamiliar with Say Anything. So as usual, I opted to examine the albums leading up to In Defense Of The Genre so I might have an idea about what Say Anything was like. What I did I think?

Well, I have mixed feelings. Say Anything burst into the indie scene with Baseball, an album that the band has never really been proud of and have refused to play tracks from for a long time. On the one hand, I definitely understand why: if we're looking for albums that embodied the teenage emo aesthetic, Baseball would immediately jump to the top of that list. With the haphazard production, sloppy but occasionally excellent guitar work, and raw anger and petulance in Max Bemis' vocals, Baseball would be indistinguishable from a dozen other emo bands of the time, but what impressed me was the genuine emotion in Bemis' delivery and the sharper-than-average songwriting. The band had a certain degree of wit around them that I can definitely see elevated them over their peers - within their genre, of course. And that's where the biggest problem with Baseball comes up - it's painfully high school when it comes to subject matter, filled with all of the associated drama from that period. And while I definitely can see why disaffected teenagers would love the raw, unbridled anger in Say Anything, anyone with an ounce of perspective would find Baseball more than a little juvenile. 

But on the other hand, I will give credit where it's due - Say Anything definitely captured that spirit with their opening album, and while the band might have lacked nuance, they made up for it with passion. So unsurprisingly, they got signed and released their second album ...Is A Real Boy, which managed the impossible: not only did the band preserve their sound and wit, they actually got better. In fact, ...Is A Real Boy really nailed down in my mind what Say Anything did well, namely they fused intelligently biting lyrics with real passion. I'm not reminded of any of the traditional L.A. emo bands but instead of The Barenaked Ladies, both in the acrid dark humour of the lyrics and the simplistic yet extraordinarily catchy melodies (plus, they reference Nick Cave multiple times, which is automatic bonus points from me). 

But what I find most fascinating about ...Is A Real Boy is the theme - while Say Anything could have chosen to focus inwardly about Max Bemis' own neuroses (and he did have them, as he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, actively abused drugs, and was eventually checked into a mental institution), they instead directed their attentions at their genre. Of course, they were an emo band so most of the songs were written from the perspective of the band, but they still had a much stronger tendency to focus outwardly. In short, much of their material was targeted at the music industry and the toxic culture surrounding it, and they had the smart songwriting to disguise their words behind some surprisingly intricate metaphors. And when they weren't attacking the industry, they were writing very literate, occasionally high-concept material like 'Yellow Cat (Slash) Red Cat' (one of the major highlights of the album, a nuanced discussion of human complacency), 'Every Man Has A Molly' (the nasty aftermath of airing dirty laundry through music - take notes, Taylor Swift), 'I Want To Know Your Plans' (probably the closest thing to an honest love song Say Anything ever wrote), and 'Admit It!!!' (my other favourite track, a brutally articulate spoken-word-filled diatribe against hipsters that's eons harsher than anything I will ever write).

So it isn't surprising in the slightest is that Say Anything very quickly built some major artistic clout in the industry, particularly around the L.A. emo scene, and combined with Bemis' growing reputation as a mad genius, it's not a surprise he managed to rope in twenty-three guest vocalists for his newest project and the topic of my review today. In Bemis' own words, the album had a twofold purpose: an autobiographical exploration of his mental breakdown and recovery; and a tribute to the other emo bands and genre Say Anything liked. Do they succeed?

album review: 'damage' by jimmy eat world

Ugh, I hate this. 

I hate that this is a factor in my enjoyment of songs, because it makes me look like the most nitpicking, audiophile asshole, the kind that bitches against iPods because of mp3 compression and only listens to FLACs, or the kind that remixes and remasters songs in his basement and because of that has an inflated feeling that 'he just knows music better'. Let me make this absolutely fucking clear - I completely get why people like listening to music at high bitrates, and I would be lying if I didn't say that I'd take the sound of good organic vinyl over some YouTube rip any day of the week. And yeah, I will completely stand behind artists like Nick Cave when he says that Henry's Dream didn't come out properly because of the shoddy production, and I will wholeheartedly support his choice to make a phenomenal live album where he basically replayed the album properly.

But with all of that in mind, music should be about music, not production. While there is a fine art to good production and mixing, it's arguably the least important element in comparison to the instrumentation and lyrics. The notes being played and the words being sung are the creative element, the raw spark of art - production and mixing are the editing desk, the polish, the filter from which the art is passed to us. It shouldn't matter if 'Satisfaction' by the Rolling Stones is played mono or stereo or if it was run through a high pass filter or the reverb is a little too high on Jagger's microphone, it's still 'Satisfaction' by the fucking Rolling Stones. 

But as much as I don't like it, I can't help but admit that production and mixing matter. They might be the least important element in this process, but they're definitely an element in this process that is disastrous to overlook. And not for the first time, I can't help but feel that if an element of the production for this band had been improved, I'd like them a lot more.

So with that, let's talk about Jimmy Eat World, yet another entry in the list of acts that I can definitely acknowledge is good and that I can kind of like, but I can never quite love, no matter how hard I try. But unlike a case like Radiohead, I can pinpoint exactly where Jimmy Eat World doesn't work for me: the vocal production and placement in the mix has never consistently worked.

Let me expand. The band burst into the underground in 1994 with their self-titled debut, which was decent enough to score them a small cult following that was quickly squashed by their 1996 follow-up Static Prevails. Now, there are a slew of other problems with Static Prevails beyond the vocal production mix, mostly in that the songwriting was pretty lousy and the instrumentation wasn't as polished, but most of these problems were cleaned up by the 1999 album Clarity. And yes, I'll be the first to acknowledge that the best elements of Jimmy Eat World's sound - the extremely solid guitar work, the bigness in their sound, their heartfelt (if occasionally self-obsessed) lyrics - were all here. But as much as I tried, I could never get over the fact that lead singer Jim Adkins' vocals were buried midway in the track behind the guitars, and were more often than not barely audible. 

That was the other factor that always annoyed me about Jimmy Eat World, namely that the vocal performance was never very strong, as Adkins' vocals always struck me as rather thin. Fortunately the band compensated for that on their next release Bleed American, pulling the vocals more to the front of the track and adding reverb and backing vocals to support Adkins, and sure enough Bleed American was their strongest album yet. They'd follow it with Futures and Chase This Light, both albums I really like but don't quite love, mostly due to the swarm of little irritations that always seemed to leap to the forefront of my mind, mostly surrounding Adkins' vocals and the occasional sloppy or immature bit of songwriting (the worst thing I'll ever say about the instrumentation is that on a few occasions it got a little cluttered or repetitive). And yet always the persistent problem I had on all three of those albums is that every so often - often enough to be noticeable and frustrating - the vocals were just drowned out entirely behind the roar of the guitars, and while I'll admit that this will always be a pet peeve of mine, it rankles here all the more because of how much Jimmy Eat World consistently got right.

And then they released Invented in 2010, and... well, I'll be more polite to it than some of the more rabid fans and say it was uneven. Sure, the trademark elements of Jimmy Eat World were here, and the vocals were high enough in the mix that they could usually be pulled out, but the attempts to add electronic elements and a female backing vocalist did nothing to help matters, and the songwriting hadn't improved (both in technical proficiency or subject matter) since Chase This Light in 2007. But it was on Invented they let lead guitarist Tom Linton sing lead vocals, and it was here that my problem with Jimmy Eat World finally crystallizes - the vocal production on Jim Adkins' voice never fits with the production of the rest of the track. Sure, his thin tenor matches the subject matter of the songs fairly well (Jimmy Eat World has always been one of the wussiest bands in alt rock and power pop, and that's saying something), but in comparison to the crashing, epic sounding guitars and pounding bass and drums, he always sounds drowned out, which ultimately comes down to an issue of vocal production. In comparison, Tom Linton's rasp might have less range but the vocal production done for his part of the mix flows much better.

But now it's 2013, and Jimmy Eat World have been active for over nineteen years - surely on their most recent album Damage they will have figured out the vocal production balance, right?