Review: The Big Easy – A Long Year

The Big Easy - A Long Year

If there’s anything Brooklyn-based band The Big Easy can count on as they release their debut record A Long Year, it’s that there’s probably absolutely nobody with whom that title isn’t gonna resonate. The end of 2020 is in reach now, and while, sure, in some ways it feels like the start of it was only two weeks ago, it also feels like it was a thousand years ago. A pandemic, the ever-growing creep of fascism, however many personal battles we all may have had, and all before whatever is to come on election day; it’s been a long, scary, exhausting and often hopeless year. To state the obvious, we live in a very different world now than we did back on January 1st.

A Long Year was penned in that old world, and it sounds like a time that’s gone now, if hopefully temporarily. This is raucous, beer-soaked, dive bar punk. This is being jammed into a tight space with strangers and feeling the spray of sweat and spit like it’s ocean mist and not a potential death sentence. Remember that? It sounds kinda horrifying now, but also like to just experience that one more time would be some kind of salvation.

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Review: Forever Honey – Pre-Mortem High EP

Forever Honey - Pre-Mortem High EP

In some alternate universe, in a John Hughes soundtrack that never was, exists Forever Honey’s ‘Christian,’ 30-some years earlier than it would come to exist in ours. The opening track of the Brooklyn band’s new EP ‘Pre-Mortem High,’ ‘Christian’ is all zig-zagging bass, jangling guitar and rapturous synth, a coming of age scene in a new wave palette; some escapade on a warm summer night, a joyful high tinged with the mourning in knowing it won’t last.

As it is, ‘Pre-Mortem High’ was written not for a movie but for the moments in our young lives that feel cinematic anyway. When emotions are intensified to fill a panorama, when every word spoken feels vital. ‘Christian’ feels ecstatic yet filled with painful disappointment; conversely, end track ‘Where We Are Sometimes’ is devastating yet full of hopeful love. It’s an encapsulation of the intensity of youth, the certainty that every conflicting feeling is entirely congruous.

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Review: ThreadBear – Fine By Me

threadbear album art

There’s not much of a tradition of emo in the UK. In the 90s, emo developed so geographically that the generally-used term for it is ‘Midwest emo,’ since its sound was incubated by bands like Cap’n Jazz from Illinois, The Promise Ring from Wisconsin, The Get Up Kids from Missouri. That’s not to say that that scene was by any means insular; Texas is the Reason from New York, Jimmy Eat World from Arizona and Mineral from Texas all had distinctly ‘Midwestern’ sounds, and the forebearers of any one of those bands were Sunny Day Real Estate from Washington state and Jawbreaker from California. Plus, none of it would have happened without the Revolution Summer bands from DC, most notably Embrace and Rites of Spring, and perhaps, more importantly, Fugazi which sprung from both of them. Cross-country touring, plus zines and demo exchanges, meant that emo was pretty effectively shared across every corner of the States. Many of those bands did tour the UK too – Braid and The Get Up Kids went over there together in 1998 – but it seemingly wasn’t enough to imprint on the UK its own parallel scene, at least not one that made enough of an impact to enter the canon of emo as we talk about it twenty years on.

What we have now is ‘fourth-wave’ emo (also known as emo revival), a spiritual continuation of that Midwestern scene, with the difference being that this one was and is built heavily around Bandcamp, Twitter, and online blogs like PropertyOfZack, The Alternative and, yeah, Chorus.fm. Since house shows and local community amongst bands are still key to DIY, it didn’t bring about a total eradication of geography – ask anyone about the Philadelphia scene, for example – but it does mean that now there’s no ocean for music to travel, bands that emulate the 90s Midwestern sound can pop up anywhere.

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Review: Oso Oso – Basking in the Glow

Oso Oso Album Art

My first thought when I heard “The View” – the second track on Basking in the Glow but first in earnest, with a full band and a chorus (the latter of which will prove to be very important on this record) – was that it sounds like it’s from 2003. A pop-punk song from 2003; from a major label band, and a song that would have stuck. We’d still know all the words today.

I guess whether this is a compliment or not depends on your feelings about 00s mall punk, but I absolutely mean it as one. More importantly, it seems that Jade Lilitri – the man behind Oso Oso – would take it as one, or at least isn’t afraid of hearing it. The harmonies, the bouncy chorus, the bridge that drops into half-time, they all feel crafted with such deliberate nostalgia, reverence even, for that era of punk. That’s the common musical thread of the record, all the way through – I hear, at different times, flashes of Dashboard Confessional, Saves The Day, All-American Rejects. (These are less cool influences than the ones I’ve seen critics assign to Oso Oso in the past, like Death Cab For Cutie and Built To Spill; then again, the way that nostalgia cycles means a whole generation listening to this is probably more attracted to the former than the latter.) Perhaps oxymoronically, though, it doesn’t feel like we’ve heard it before – it’s not a copycat, and most of the time you can’t pin it down to whom exactly it sounds like. It would have been an entry in the canon of that time in its own right, and it deserves the same in its own time too.

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Review: Fury – Failed Entertainment

Fury Failed Entertainment Album Art

In 1991, on Fugazi’s ‘Stacks,’ Ian MacKaye sang, ‘America is just a word but I use it.’ Minor Threat, the hardcore band that MacKaye was best known for before Fugazi, didn’t deal with concepts like that; theirs were personal politics, the friends who had betrayed you or the assholes who pissed you off. Their outlook was rigid, little nuance or philosophical thought, and the standard template for hardcore remains as such. MacKaye grew tired of hardcore before long, though, of its violence and rigidity. Fugazi, in a lot of ways, was an anti-hardcore band. Their rich and complex musicality couldn’t be further from Minor Threat’s fast, loud and sloppy approach, and their lyrics offered political and social commentary that was intelligent and nuanced. It was post-hardcore.

On ‘Birds of Paradise,’ a track halfway through Fury’s Failed Entertainment, vocalist Jeremy Stith declares, ‘US of A, just an idea to me.’ Fugazi’s semantics are echoed, but the similarity stretches further than that; this too is a record that reaches beyond what hardcore tends to be. The crucial difference is that Failed Entertainment is, unmistakably and proudly, a hardcore record.

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Review: American Football – American Football (LP3)

American Football

A reunion is a tricky thing to get right. When a widely adored band returns after a long time away, there’s a daunting amount of room for disappointment. Some bands try to recapture the lightning they managed to bottle two decades ago and end up sounding like shambling zombies of their former selves, unable – as anyone is – to return in their middle age to being the people they were in their youth. Others don’t concern themselves with new music at all and simply play the old songs to the people who want to hear them with only half the energy and sincerity it would take to make them worth the ticket price. Emo has seen examples of both models in the past half-decade, as the genre’s revival sparked a renewed interest in its golden-era bands. But it’s also seen a third model. A select few groups have found a sweet spot of honesty and genuineness in who they are now, combined with a connection to and awareness of who they were twenty years ago. It’s in this sweet spot that a band manages to hang on to their soul.

As reunited emo bands go, American Football are anomalous in that their second time around has by now lasted longer than their first. All the mythos and reverence that came to surround the band in the time that they were gone was built in only three years and one record together. It puts them in a unique position, that of being on only their third album 22 years after they formed; they’re a band still exploring and expanding their sound, yet with the maturity that comes from age and experience.

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Review: New Found Glory – Not Without a Fight

New Found Glory - NWOAF

When New Found Glory broke into the mainstream in the early 2000s, it certainly wasn’t amongst a shortage of pop-punk bands. The post-Blink boom meant that for a few years, every bunch of spiky-haired kids in Dickies was getting picked up by a major and amassing radio and MTV coverage. But what always set New Found Glory apart from their Warped Tour ilk was their genuine connection to heavy music. A teenaged Chad Gilbert was the vocalist for metalcore legends Shai Hulud before he was New Found Glory’s guitarist, and where other pop-punk bands of the time were taking influence from the likes of Descendents and Screeching Weasel, NFG were drawing more from East Coast hardcore like Madball and Snapcase. They positioned NYHC guitar tones as the backdrop to sickly-sweet pop vocals, and mastered both elements better than any of their peers could.

This distinction set New Found Glory up for longevity that outlasted pop punk’s commercial day in the sun, and such longevity makes inevitable – and perhaps relies on – a change in course. So in 2006, while bands like Midtown and Fenix TX had dissolved around them, New Found Glory released their fifth album Coming Home. It swapped the crunchy riffs for mid-tempo soft rock more comparable to, say, Journey than to their heavy early influences. It was a smart move, with pop-punk by now commercially dead in the water as emo-pop took its place, and one that paid off too; it was likely better received critically than any of their records prior.

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