emo

Record #802: Cursive – Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes (1997)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

I’ve been a fan of Omaha’s Cursive for quite a while. I picked up a CD single of “Art is Hard” from my local music store in 12th grade, and I spun those two songs on repeat for weeks. I downloaded several songs from Domestica on LimeWire and burned them to my one of my many emo mixes. Through my “serious music fan” phase in college, The Ugly Organ was one of the few emo records that I still listened to regularly.

But as much as I love those records, I’ve never dug too deep into their earlier material. That is, until I bought a box of classic records from my friend Stephen that included most of the Cursive back catalog.

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Record #808: At the Drive-In – Vaya (1999)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Conversations about At the Drive-In’s best release usually dance around a gridlock between In/Casino/Out and Relationship of Command. 

However, that conversation simply cannot be complete without taking their incredible EP Vaya into consideration. While it contains absolutely no shortage of ATDI’s signature angular fury, it also sees the group adding experimental elements into their sonic palate. While it’s often described as a bridge between the two legendary full lengths, it even points to Omar and Cedric’s future in the Mars Volta with astonishing prescience.

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Record #807: At the Drive-In – In/Casino/Out (1998)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

Many years ago, I said that Relationship of Command was undisputedly the best record At the Drive-In had ever released. And while it remains my favorite, I can’t deny the fact that my 2013 claim wasn’t influenced by the astronomical price that vinyl copies of In/Casino/Out were commanding.

As fortune would have it though, I recently acquired a large lot of records from a friend that included an unreal number of classics for a more-than-agreeable price (thanks, Stephen), which included this record that, historical revisionism aside, means a great deal to me (and a whole lot more that will be reviewed in the coming days and weeks).

While the band had been active for four years before this with two EPs and a full length to their name, In/Casino/Out is really the album where they became the At the Drive-In that would become post hardcore legends.

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Record #796: You Could Be a Cop/Amid the Old Wounds – Split (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Perhaps the biggest problem with emo is how the term has been fundamentally misunderstood.

When the term finally broke into the cultural lexicon in the early 2000s, it was mostly attached to bands like Panic! At the Disco, Green Day, and My Chemical Romance, who are not emo bands—MCR would even tell you this themselves. And yet, legions of yuppies and soccer moms would see dark clothes, shaggy hair, and eyeliner and attach the three-letter epithet to it. Even bands who did claim the tag for themselves in those days bore little resemblance to the emo bands of yore.

But over the last several years, a crop of musicians have risen up to free the word Emo from the girl jeans of its mallcore misappropriation and return to the sparkling guitars, patient dynamics, and mournful vocals of the scene’s earlier days.

And this split, between Norway’s You Could Be A Cop and Germany’s Amid the Old Wounds, is a perfect example of what emo is supposed to be.

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Record #792: Christie Front Drive – Stereo (1996)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Emo kid that I was, I’ve discovered the last few years that there’s a fair amount of the genre that I missed. Obviously I was aware of early pioneers like Sunny Day Real Estate and Mineral, but that was through turn-of-the-millennium bands like Further Seems Forever, The Juliana Theory and twothirtyeight. I was a big Jimmy Eat World fan, but I was far more familiar with Bleed American than Clarity.

I say this to explain that even though Christie Front Drive have been cult favorites among Second Wave emo fans, I had given very little playtime before buying this LP on the strength of their reputation alone.

And let me tell you what: 16-year-old Nat would have eaten this record up.

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Record #769: Fiddlehead – Between the Richness (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In 2018, members of hardcore legends Have Heart and post-hardcore heroes Basement released Springtime and Blind, a stunningly tight and catchy piece of post hardcore that was as catchy as it was urgent. Despite its clear hardcore roots, there was a remarkable pop sensibility that injected each song with throat-shredding singalong passages, all wrapped up in a 25-minute package.

At the time, it seemed like a lightning-in-a-bottle record. The kind of record that was singularly excellent, even if you couldn’t quite describe why. And usually, these sorts of records prove incredibly difficult to follow up. After all, capturing lightning once is almost impossible. But twice?

Apparently it’s not that hard for Fiddlehead.

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Record #757: Coheed and Cambria – Second Stage Turbine Blade (2002)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

Looking back, it makes no sense that Coheed and Cambria was ever lumped in with the early 2000s emo/post-hardcore/pop-punk scene.  Sure, they were members of the Equal Vision Records roster and shared a number of tours with scene mainstays like Thursday, The Used, and Further Seems Forever. They were even a fixture of Warped Tour for several years.

But musically, they have far more in common with bands like Rush and Led Zeppelin (to whom Coheed was compared by Guitar World on the advent of their sophomore album) than Sunny Day Real Estate or Jimmy Eat World. If Coheed was emo, it was by the most tenuous definitions of the term.

But that doesn’t change the fact that this was one of the most important albums of my emo phase.

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Record #753: The Casket Lottery – Moving Mountains (2000)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It feels bizarre to remember now, but by the time 2000 rolled around, many people had felt that the emo scene was already waning—after all, Sunny Day Real Estate had already broken up and had a reunion. Mineral had been defunct for two years. And even those stalwarts were considered to be latecomers—and even imposters—to a  scene rooted in emotional hardcore bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace.

But the turn of the Millenium saw an explosion of the emo scene, with bands like American Football, The Appleseed Cast, Jimmy Eat World, and hundreds of others borrowing the juxtaposition of sparkling clean guitars and cathartic explosions of distortion to create their own language.

One of the understated heroes of this scene was The Casket Lottery, formed by former members of mathcore pioneers Coalesce. While certainly a departure from their off-time metalcore chugs, there’s certainly enough muscle in their sophomore album, Moving Mountains, to dissuade anyone from calling them wimpy emo kids.

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Record #751: The Appleseed Cast – Two Conversations (2003)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

If I seem to be contradicting myself across the different narratives I tell about how I got into the Appleseed Cast, it’s because my relationship with the band is a little contradictory. We had many passings with one another before I finally fell in love with the project, and each of those feel like a fitting introduction for a story about how someone fell in love with one of their favorite bands.

But perhaps the most impressing of those introductions was the track “Fight Song,” a driving, passionate lament that cut me to the core when I first heard it. I was already familiar with the group after hearing them on a few Deep Elm compilations, but I had never dug further. “Fight Song” convinced me that they were a band that was worth the attention.

Unfortunately, it came at a time when I was setting aside the emo/punk/hardcore scene as a whole and branching out into other genres, and so I missed it at the time. Luckily, there’s always still time.

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Record #749: The Appleseed Cast – Mare Vitalis (2000)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Across their near twenty-five year career, The Appleseed Cast has cemented themselves as a band that can do no wrong. Their work has consistently exceeded expectations, pushing their songwriting, instrumental performances, and inventive production to the limit with each release.

But what’s sometimes difficult to remember is just how quickly they jumped to that level, as seen by their 2000 full-length Mare Vitalis, a masterwork that demonstrates the group’s ability to blend emo expressiveness and post-rock atmospherics, seasoned with some bursts of post-hardcore to taste.

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