DeMark.............Fragments of Thought About 3 Emo Albums

DAVID dEmARKFRAGMENTS OF THOUGHT ABOUT 3 EMO ALBUMS THAT YOU MAY SOMEDAY NEED

Panucci’s Pizza - All of my Friends are Familiar and the Steps I Took to Realize This

Irony is a difficult territory to navigate in modern (let’s drop the revival label - this is it’s own-ass movement) emo. Much of the emo being produced these days is rooted in self-consciousness, and this includes a meta-consciousness of the openly emotional or “whiny” nature of the music. Panucci’s Pizza somehow finds a way to address the issue without succumbing to the pressure of abandoning the directness of their means of expression by turning it all into a joke. Introduced to the idea by webcomic Questionable Content, I’ve taken the (itself self-conscious) idea of post-post-irony to be a legitimate philosophy for life as a whole. The post-post-ironic being acts entirely genuinely - loving genuinely, feeling and expressing pain genuinely and doing things because those things will be rewarding - but with an acknowledgement that their actions are a response to and mockery of the idea of “hipster” culture irony. Panucci’s Pizza is named after a location from Futurama that sells booty shorts with their logo on one cheek, and there’s a winking affect to their music-making - and yet when they mean to whine, they whine, self-conscious meta-commentary be damned. In short, either they’re geniuses in their understanding of hipster America, or I’m reading waaaaay too far into what they’re doing. Regardless of that reading, taken at face value, All of my Friends are Familiar is a damn evocative album. The lo-fi aesthetic lends itself well to the intimacy reflected by the lyrics, which tell in plain terms stories of all-out self-loathing, frustration and desperation. Clever snippets and one-liners will follow you around for weeks, and the overriding bluntness of the Philadelphia duo’s “whining” has the potential to knock the listener off their feet with its honesty and universality. (Who hasn’t had a situation in which “and you hate me / and I’m fucking lame” would resonate?) Panucci’s Pizza is a young band, and their enthusiasm and passion haven’t been dampened by the wet blanket of jadedness quite yet. While they may sometimes come out raw, All of my Friends is bursting with ideas, and it’s as fun a listen as it presumably was to make.

William Bonney - Good Vibes

William Bonney shares with Panucci’s Pizza their refusal to lose their intention to ironize but take a far more direct route to the same conclusion. Stubbornly refusing to address the issue, they instead take a route of unfiltered directness, and what an effective result that produces. From lead singer Jack Senff’s first warning not to “fill your lungs with emotion” to his chilling concluding epitaph “salt stains on my shirtsleeves / you left and I found a new me,” Good Vibes is a fucking rollercoaster. All of the feelings you’ve ever felt stack themselves on top of each other and overwhelm you. Drifting into screamo territory, the album is hard-hitting and consistently abrasive, making the listening experience akin to the type of release sought after through self-harm, should the listener let go of themselves thoroughly enough that the ego and Senff’s voice blend together. Sometimes you need to be screamed at, and sometimes you need to scream along. William Bonney provides an avenue for both, utterly eviscerating you at the same time they rebuild you.

Algernon Cadwallader - Some Kind of Cadwallader

During the first week of my freshman spring term, I had a life-alteringly traumatic experience that has contextualized every moment since it. For some time afterward, I was effectively dead to new experience. I could hear an album I had never heard before and recognize and understand its beauty, but there was always an overriding block preventing me from establishing an emotional connection to the listening experience. As I’ve recovered and that block started to disappear, music appreciation experiences I used to take for granted have grown exponentially in meaning. One of these is the feeling of listening to an album for the first time and knowing that it will become a favorite - that you’ve been waiting to hear it for your entire life. When I heard Some Kind of Cadwallader for the first time, it hit me in the same way albums used to hit me back in high school. Falling in love with this album has served to affirm that yes, there is still beauty in the world and yes, I am still present enough to appreciate it. As I’ve written about in my previous emo-centric NoFi articles, some of the most powerful emo moments are those that marry the seemingly incongruous component of despondent sadness with the joy and thrill of pure feeling. Life is boring when you shut yourself off to it, and there is inherent reward in allowing yourself to hit the polar regions of emotion. Algernon Cadwallader makes music that cannot be classified as decidedly “happy” or “sad,” instead reflecting the range and depth of human emotion. Some Kind Of Cadwallader is first and foremost a fun album to listen to with energy and elation seeping from its pores despite its unabashedly angsty content. Emo music is about expressing the humanity of its creators, and Algernon Cadwallader’s humanity encapsulates the listener in all its complexity.