And it’s not just that opener “This is the End of Your Life” served as my intermediate vocal lessons, or the deep sense of comfort that Moments/In a Fraction still give me. It’s not the memory I have I driving my little sister around as she clutched her giant stuffed lion and me quipping, “we know your lion” during the chorus of “Liability.” And it’s not just the time my best friend recruited me to sing and play guitar for his recording of Piano Song (his Recording Arts class final project).
It’s not just sentimentality.
This album is one hundred percent killer. The perfect midpoint between Understand’s lushly orchestrated emo and Love’s more straightforward rock n roll. The songs are ambitious without being unapproachable. And it’s the strength of these songs that helps the six-song* Music From Another Room stand eye to eye with even their best full lengths.
*vinyl has a bonus track
In the beginning of the 21st century, I was in a post hardcore band with some high school friends. The three of us had some pretty different tastes–I had a strong bias toward melodic emo like Further Seems Forever and the Juliana Theory, Travis’ tastes were for almost purely punk bands like Flogging Molly and Against Me, and Seth had a soft spot for nu-metal a mile wide. But there was one album that none of us could get enough of: In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 by Coheed and Cambria. This disc joined Thrice’s Artist in the Ambulance and Thursday’s War All the Time to form the triumvirate of albums we all played on repeat.
About nine years ago, a Pedro the Lion fanatic named Calvin added me on MySpace because I looked a little like Aaron Weiss from mewithoutYou (this is true). We became friends through many an AIM chat (nine years ago, remember?) where we discovered that we were both songwriters with a penchant for emo-tinged acoustic music. I was striking out on a solo project after the dissolution of my high school post-hardcore band, he had just started playing Bazan-esque tunes under the name The Foxery. Over time, the Foxery added members and influences until this year when they got signed to Spartan Records and released the emo record of the year, which is no small task in the year that brought the emo revival no one knew we needed.