emo

Record #926: The Anniversary – Designing A Nervous Breakdown (2000)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

They say hindsight is 20/20, but I’m not sure that’s the case. The lens of nostalgia often glazes over details with a broad brush, homogenizing the intricate diversity of moments in time into a monotone.

Take, for instance, the second wave of emo. While revisionist history might paint a scene of twinkly guitars and angular drumming (thanks, American Football), the view from the ground was far different. Emo was not nearly as much a matter of a sound as it was an ethos.

One of the best examples of emo’s diversity is The Anniversary. While emo was undoubtedly rooted in punk and hardcore, their debut record Designing A Nervous Breakdown borrows much of its palette from decidedly non-punk sources, offering up a heaping helping of hooks, harmonies, and synthesizers. While it doesn’t sound like what anyone might think of when they imagine emo, it remains one of the most well-loved emo records of the era.

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Record #925: …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – Source Tags & Codes (2002)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In the summer of 2005, my high school band played a show in a dude’s parents’ garage (that dude is now a member of the excellent band JAGALCHI). In between bands, a song was playing that gave the same sort of frantic post-hardcore as At the Drive-In. I was transfixed and asked what it was. The answer was a band called …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. A couple years later, I stumbled upon their album Source Tages & Codes in the used CD section of my local record store. I bought it without hesitation.

But as I listened to it, I found it a bit too scattered to get my head around it. There were moments of the chaotic bliss that grabbed my attention, but they were brief and rare among a bevy of anthemic emo songs, theatrical prog, and, to my dismay (then) power pop songs.

With the space of two decades between my first impression and finding it for free on The Sound of Vinyl’s Father’s Day sale, I’ve realized that what I initially saw as scatterbrained is actually sprawling, offering a snapshot of the early 2000s alt scene that includes bits of every subgenre’s tendencies.

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Record #919: Khamsin – What’s Left of Life? (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In 2018, I was part of the team organizing Bloodline Fest here in South Bend. While we were talking to idle threat about playing, they asked if there was a space for their friends Khamsin, who they were touring with. And boy am I glad there was. They looked to be fresh out of high school, but as soon as they started playing, it brought me back to my own teenage years, playing a brand of introspective post-hardcore reminiscent of As Cities Burn, Brand New, mewithoutYou, and Beggars-era Thrice.

As strong as that initial performance was though, it barely scratched the surface of what they would achieve on their debut full-length, What’s Left of Life? Those same influences are present, but not derivative as much as an accent in their own voice. And they use that voice to tell a story of grief and loss that’s as raw as it is tender.

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Record #918: Crowning – Survival / Sickness (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I have said, often and loudly, that I don’t like screamo. And I don’t mean screamo as a catchall term for any music with screaming in it, like your mom uses it, but as a distinct branch of emo and hardcore heralded by bands like Orchid, pg.99, and Saetia. I’ve proclaimed for years that it’s too abrasive and tuneless for my tastes.

Exceptions were made, of course, for envy. And Boneflower. And Chalk Hands. And Birds in Row. And…actually you know what, maybe I do like screamo. Because recently, I’ve found a few skramz records that I really love. One that was introduced to me recently was Survival / Sickness, the debut record from Crowning out of Chicago, a cathartic fury so explosive that it lasts a mere eighteen minutes before burning out. Still, it packs in more energy in that short runtime than several albums three times its length.

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Record #902: Floorbird – Fall Apart Anywhere (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Getting into music as a kid, my journey was flanked by a chorus of older dudes chanting “they don’t make it like they used to.” I brushed it aside as grumpy old man complaining, because of course there’s still great music being made. But in the last few years, I’ve started to see more and more of my own peers joining that old refrain, assigning it to ’00s emo and pop punk instead of classic rock.

But my reaction remains the same. There’s tons of great music being released now, much of it checking off the same boxes of the music they loved as adolescents.

Take for instance Floorbird. They’re a newer act, but if you were to tell someone that they played Warped Tour in 2003, they’d likely believe you. Fall Apart Anywhere was released in 2020, but it pulls off the same sort of hooky blend of emo and pop punk as Dashboard Confessional, The Ataris, and Jimmy Eat World.

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Record #898: The Gloria Record – The Gloria Record (1998)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I never had a job through high school—my parents said my job was to be a full-time student. Instead, I got a $ 40-a-week allowance to spend on whatever I wanted. So when I graduated high school and got around $2000 between graduation money and cashing out my childhood savings account, I spent like mad.

I blew through most of that sum by the fall, much of it buying up CDs from bands I had tangentially heard of. That included the legendary Mineral of course, but I must have heard of Chris Simpson’s side project The Gloria Record as well, because I listened to this CD all the time. 

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Record #882: Curtail – When the Sway Sets (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Sometimes, a record doesn’t need to have high aspirations to be great. It doesn’t need to redefine the boundaries of genre or have some intricate narrative thread. It doesn’t need to offer up some transcendent experience to the listeners.

Sometimes, it just needs to be really, really catchy.

And that’s about the best way I can think to describe this record from Curtail, an Akron quartet made up of emo veterans that delivers effortlessly infectious tunes that isn’t quite emo, but isn’t quite not emo either.

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Record #875: CATERPILLARS – Frontier for the Fallen (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I spent much of my adult life trying to separate myself from the word “emo.” Sure, part of that was an effort to grow beyond my adolescent self, but the much larger part was a protest to how the word had been stolen by the guylinered mallcore bands of the mid-aughts that I had no interest in at all.

But the truth is, no matter what My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco did with culture’s idea of emo, that doesn’t change my deep love of bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, Mineral, Further Seems Forever, et al.

The last several years, I’ve discovered I’m not alone in that. Much of this is due to an online community called Midwest Emoposting, which introduced me to scores of folks with the same idea of what emo should be, which reignited my deep love of the genre. That also introduced me to a number of bands carrying that flame, such as CATERPILLARS, whose new album Frontier For the Fallen is a masterclass in propulsive, sweeping, emotive songcraft.

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Record #872: idle threat – Blurred Visions (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Across the last several years, it’s been almost impossible to have any presence in the Midwestern DIY scene without running into Idle Threat. The Nashville post-hardcore outfit has been the dictionary definition of workhorses, playing every small festival I’ve been to (or organized), and even organizing their own.

And for years, they’ve done this all as an entirely independent band. Then, fate moved the hands of justice, and they were added to the iconic Tooth & Nail Records (alongside fellow indie workhorses Salt Creek and Valleyheart).

That deal brought about Blurred Visions, the long-awaited debut full-length. While it’s obvious that they had some additional funds, it retains all of the passion and earnestness of their early EPs without ever getting unfocused with the longer running time.

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Record #869: Elliott – False Cathedrals (2000)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It’s no secret that I’ve been known to miss important bands. For example, I missed Louisville emo legends Elliott entirely until I bought a copy of Song in the Air after coming across it in a record store in St. Pete FL in early 2020. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that most people consider that record to be a disappointment. 

The real show, so I was told, was False Cathedrals. So when that record got a repress, I did the same thing I did with Song in the Air: I bought it without listening to it.

And while personally my opinion on its follow up hasn’t been changed, it’s easy to see why this album gets the love it does.

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