Shouldn't Let This Get to Me

 Duff came through big rec in our music exchange this week, giving Crash of Rhinos' second album Knots.

We've recently been focusing on emo, which started a few weeks ago when Duff remarked that he had re-visited Braid's Frame and Canvas for the first time in a while and was pleased to see it hold up as well as it did.* Emo is one of our biggest overlaps in music and in a genre that is hard to define sonically and has so many different parts and eras, we tend to agree more than we disagree, being picky about 2nd wave, missing the 3rd wave, and gravitating towards the fourth wave. I think it's also important that this overlap in emo taste was a huge contributing factor to the way that we wrote songs together in Beat Noir. We had the same vocabulary when it came to putting parts together, especially on Sovereignties.

*Duh

This all being said, we've both drifted away from the genre recently, as I don't think either of would say that any emo releases from the last five years have really stuck with us. The last one I really liked was probably Oliver Houston's Whatever Works? I feel like emo, pop-punk, and orgcore have slowly merged into one genre that kept some of the fans of those genres, but in my opinion lost everything that appealed to me from each of them. I also just grew out it too. I still love emo music and will check out new stuff, but I'm also too old for the GothBoiClique stuff and pretending I'm into it would just be posing. I don't want to be a 35-year-old who still deeply relates to American Football, but at the same time, a lot of emo music was super important to me for a long time and I can respect that.

Anyways, Crash of Rhinos was great, if a little long. IMO, if your punk album is over 35 minutes, it better be extremely ambitious and have a lot of stuff holding it together. BUT, the main thing that I thought about while listening to it was that since the 4th wave of emo is now over, I feel like I can say with hindsight that it was absolutely the best iteration of the genre. From my perspective, it took all the best parts of older emo, the DIY hardcore ethos of the first wave, the open-tuning guitar riffs of the second, and the hooks of the third, while (mostly) doing away with the over-the-top corniness that plagues the genre.

As always, the ending is the ending.