I don’t know a whole lot about Hop Along. I know that they’re on Saddle Creek—home of bands like Bright Eyes and Cursive—and I know that I’ve heard their name tossed around among emo circles.
With this information, I expected a lot of heart-tugging songwriting and emotive delivery.
I did not expect it to be so damn catchy. Continue reading
Jorden Dreyers, lead singer of La Dispute, is a bit of an enigma. He masquerades as a hardcore frontman, thrashing across the stage as he screams his lungs out.
In actuality, he’s a writer, through and through, showing more kinship with Ernest Hemingway than Henry Rollins.
In the great scheme of music history, it’s near impossible to talk about La Dispute without mentioning mewithoutYou. And I’m as guilty as anyone in that regard—mewithoutYou has been my favorite band for around thirteen years, and they were the first band to mix hardcore conventions and spoken-word (shouted-word?) vocals that La Dispute also uses.
It was this very relationship that kept me from La Dispute. I dismissed them as derivative—runners-up that sought to usurp of the throne mewithoutYou abdicated when they had their folky phase.
But then, I actually started listening to La Dispute. And brother, they don’t deserve my dismissal.
Memory is a funny thing. When the intersection of thrift and communal nostalgia led me to buy this record when I found it on the cheap, I didn’t expect that I would have ever had every single song on here memorized.
Being a well-loved indie darling is something of a double-edged sword. You can either suffer in anonymity while your immense talent fails to find the appreciation it deserves, or you can find widespread success and get labeled a sell-out.
And ever since hopping on a major-label with Plans, every new Death Cab For Cutie album has been treated with speculation and dismissal.
Often, when a band jumps between genres, it betrays a lack of self-awareness—a sign that they have no idea what their voice sounds like.
But on As Tall As Lion’s swan song, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
It was tough out here for a punk kid in the early 2000s looking for new music. Internet speeds to support streaming would take years to develop. We had Napster, but we it took hours to download a single song.
My go-to method was to read articles about bands I already liked and pay attention to their influences. And as I pored over articles, three names kept coming up: Sunny Day Real Estate, Fugazi, and Jawbox.
SDRE and Fugazi became instant obsessions. And when I started collecting more seriously, they were among the first discographies I looked for. But somehow, this is the first Jawbox album I’ve added to my collection (barring a CD copy of Novelty I bought on the cheap, and a CD of this album I found at Goodwill).
I can’t tell you why it took me so long to buy this record, but it doesn’t deserve it.
Lemme tell you about my friend Jack.
We first met when I moved back to my hometown from Chicago. There wasn’t much of a music scene to speak of, but a few of us saw the potential for a thriving arts community. There were plenty of artists around, but there was very little support for them.
One of those groups was the short-lived Merchant Ships, a post-hardcore act helmed by Jack that somehow managed to gain a huge following on MySpace. The group had already dissolved by the time I met him.
He was still in high school.
I first got into music back in the dial-up days. We didn’t have Spotify or Pandora; the closest thing we had to music streaming was our rich friend’s dad’s satellite radio. If we wanted to hear a specific song, we had to wait an hour or more to download it – yes, just one song. And there was nothing worse than spending hours waiting for a song to download, only for it to suck. Before adding anything to my Limewire queue, I needed assurance that it was gonna be worth it.
I spent hours a day poring over music sites, record label rosters, and liner notes, hoping to find bands that would be worth the download time.
“If there’s no such thing as time, you’re already there,” asserts the professorial voice that opens the record.
But given that it took me seven years to add this record to my collection, I have to take issue with his claims.