This weekend I made a couple impulse buys at the music store. I previewed Mae’s The Everglow and Copleand’s In Motion and liked them enough that I picked them up. I need to listen to them a couple days to let them settle in and then maybe I’ll review them. Both bands have been loosely (and probably unfairly) lumped into the genre of emo.
Wikipedia does a pretty good job of defining emo. The latest generation of emo often presents a juxtaposition between harsh noise and beautiful melodies and the singing often alternates from whispers to screams, often in the same song. The genre is hard to define because it doesn’t have a defining sound, but it does generally have lyrics that revolve around familiar topics. The interesting thing about emo is that you will find artists who are bold about their faith, but you won’t find emo music on the cover of CCM magazine or in the front of your Family Bookstore. Many artists are passing by the CCM world and going to straight to the mainstream as their careers progress.
My first exposure to the genre was via Further Seems Forever’s The Moon Is Down. I saw the band at Cornerstone in 2002 and was amazed by the overwhelming crowd response. I stood in the tent and watched as the fans at the front of the stage shouted the songs so loud that they overpowered the singer, what a loyal following! I picked up the album by the Boca Raton-based band, which mostly centers around the joy and sorrow of being in a long distance relationship (and while I can’t really identify with that anymore, at one time I *was* in Boca Raton and in a long-distance relationship, so maybe there is some connection there.) What really drew me into the album was the creative cadence and rhythms of the songs and the ebb and flow of intensity that flows throughout the album. Of course, Chris Carrabba has now moved on to his own work as Dashboard Confessional, perhaps the current defining band for the pop version of the genre, but FSF has done alright without him and I’ve followed FSF far more than Dashboard Confessional as it was the sound that originally attracted me, not really Carrabba’s forlorn teen-love lyrics.
A friend and I once discussed that being happily married and content is good for your life, but not really good for your music. There just are not very many bands out there that write very interesting stuff about being in a fulfulling marriage (I will name three exceptions that I can think of: 1. Steve Hindalong did a very good job of describing the marital sturm-and-drang of marriage on The Choir’s Kissers and Killers and that has continued, though not as effectively, into their more recent work. 2. Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler discuss the struggle of bringing a marriage back from the brink on Over The Rhine’s Drunkard’s Prayer 3. Derek Webb’s most recent material drawing parallels between a wife and husband and the church and her savior) Tension, it would seem, is one of the driving factors of rock and roll, and teenage angst about the hopes and failures of love is chock full of it, so the material just naturally flows. So, while I don’t really “feel” the lyrics of younger, more recent bands, I do love the push and pull of the intensity of the sound.
So, all of this is to say, I’m so far from an emo boy as you can get, but I will confess to liking some of the music, and I’m encouraged about the future of rock music. It’s so easy to throw my hands up and say “There’s no good rock music anymore”, but I’m excited about some of the emerging bands that are combining beauty and intensity all while proclaiming bold faith and love from God without beating it over our heads.