Podcast

Download the first episode of Sweet Emotion (mp3) here.

Tracks For The First Episode!

On Wednesday night, I played the following songs:

Seaweed, "Start With"

Ray LaMontagne, "You Are The Best Thing"

Wintersleep, "Archaeologist"

Ryan Adams & the Cardinals, "Born Into A Light"

Minus The Bear, "We Are Not The Football Team (Acoustic)"

Minus The Bear, "Burying Luck (Acoustic)"

Minus The Bear, "Pachuca Sunrise (Acoustic)"

Say Anything, "Died A Jew"

Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip, "The Beat That My Heart Skipped"

Underoath, "Breathing In A New Mentality"

Underoath, "Only Survivor Was Miraculously Unharmed"

The Olympic Symphonium, "Blood From A Stone"

All Of Green, "Go Now"

All Of Green, "Vicious Circle"

...next week I'll follow through with the Owen and Pig Destroyer, eh?

Cancelled

Actually, the show won't be happening until the 29th.

iPod froze...

Sweet Emotion on the radio!

The first episode of Sweet Emotion will be broadcast on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008, at 9 p.m. EST, and will feature new music from Underoath and Minus the Bear, as well as old favorites Pig Destroyer, Owen, and more.

If you live in Northern Maine or Western New Brunswick, you can tune in to 92.1 FM to hear the show. There is also a live feed here, for those elsewhere. I should be able to post mp3s of the shows to this blog as they are recorded!

Emo Record of the Week for 10.06.08: Underøath - Lost in the Sound of Separation (Solid State)

The quality of Underoath’s records continues to skyrocket with time, so I’m assuming that the band themselves fall into the camp of “Bands that are way into growing up.” Ever since Saves the Day grew out their hair and announced that they were “just another rock band”—please!—it’s become clichéd to “leave emo behind”—Blink 182 released their serious record; Copeland went all Coldplay-slash-Radiohead; John Nolan left a then-peerless Taking Back Sunday to play piano with his sister; Brand New stopped whining and jumped on the quiet-loud dynamic (in their case, dynamo) bandwagon; Darryl Palumbo toned down the Jessica-Hopper-esque girl bashin’ and formed what is basically an Attractions cover group. Underoath make it seem original, though.

The group’s first three records, Act of Depression, Cries of the Past, and The Changing of Times, are essentially bad black metal at heart. It doesn’t matter, because all but one original member of UO is now departed. The one member happened to be Aaron Gillespie, the Phil Collins of Xtian metalcore, singing and drumming so well at the same time that the word “extravaganza” is attached somehow to his job description. In 2004, the band recruited a bunch of new members, notably new lead screamalist Spencer Chamberlain, and released They’re Only Chasing Safety. It was a big-ol’ Dashboard-reminiscent, scream n’ whine dynamic festival of pop punk trying to be metal, and it sounded awesome, if somewhat, well, Christian, and therefore maudlindramatic (“Look who’s dyin’ now/Slit your wrists from sleeping with the girl next door” being a choice lyric). It was promising. It was fresh and smoothly incorporated electronics and a choir.

But the thing was that in 2006, UO released Define the Great Line, and shattered any expectation that the listener of Chasing Safety might’ve had in mind for it. Spencer had ditched the high-pitch for a new, Southern-metal inspired throaty swagger—and when I say Southern, I mean attitude and accent (e.g. the line “Wake up, wake up, wake up/This is not a test,” sung with a palpable Panteradrawl). At the same time the riffs and vocal moved from emo to metal, the amount of time the band’s members spent listening to ISIS must’ve surely gone through the roof, as they packed numerous songs—among them the ethereal “Casting Such A Thin Shadow” and the breathtaking concluding moments of “In Regards To Myself”—with atmospheric picking and reverb ala the post-Pelican-metal school.

It’s 2008, and UO quietly released a record—the one in question here—that shatters the other two into one collective run-up to its own glory. Spencer has been taking voice lessons, and it shows, man—it shows. His growl is now fierce, terrifying, brutal, and capable of slipping back into the necessary hardcore histrionics on command, but overall just metal as fuck, without being in any way clichéd. I’m impressed. It’s Spencer’s performance that makes me want to check out their live show so bad (which I’m doing on October 24th in Worcester, MA). Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the rest of the band hasn’t followed suit, though—Tim MacTague, et al., are in fine form (check out the sick riff about halfway through the first track), and Aaron’s vocals have a special bite. The lyrics are completely desperate, with hints of trouble in paradise—“Everything is leaving me wondering/I hate that I’m questioning your everything” being one of several pseudo-Agnostic sentences to feature. There’s a lot of post-apocalyptic imagery, working its way superbly into what I feel is the album’s standout track, the Zeppelin-esque jam “Emergency Broadcast.”

It's not as though Lost is a perfect record. There are several messy vocal spots on Aaron's part, a few of which sound rather forcibly pitch-corrected (check out the dramatic "Still get us home!" line on the second-to-last track), and the whole record tapers off after the midway point. But, whereas the other major items in the UO catalogue are better as collections of songs than as wholes, Lost in the Sound is exactly that—a great, unified powerhouse of a record that belongs to be mentioned in the same breath as Brand New’s The Devil and God and Thrice’s Vheissu. If the next record they put out is as good in proportion to this as it is to their back catalogue, we're in for one amazing record.