It's You! It's Me! And There's Dancing! – Tell Me All About It | Album Review
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Self-released
There are a few things that are guaranteed to set off my “hell yeah” meter. One of them is bands from Portland, Oregon. Even though I haven’t lived full-time in the Pacific Northwest since 2018, I’m still a Portland native who feels a strong sense of pride for any cool art coming from my hometown. Second is short-ass albums. The shorter the better, honestly. I recognize 40 minutes as the standard, but if you can deliver an equally impactful experience in 20-some minutes or less, I’m all for it. Third is emo music, which feels pretty self-explanatory, especially if you’ve ever talked to me in person or read this site before. It should come as no surprise, then, that when Portland band It's You! It's Me! And There's Dancing! dropped a 14-minute scorcher of an album on Valentine’s Day, I ate that shit up like it was a gourmet meal.
Though the band is named after one of the most famous Los Campesinos! songs, the music on Tell Me All About It isn’t really emo in any traditional sense. Instead, the songs tend to lean into a more shouty punk direction. Maybe a touch of Orgcore, a hearty helping of screamo, and a dollop of post-hardcore. But fuck that, these labels are all just marketing terms anyway, right? Instead, I’ll just sum things up with the group’s bio on Bandcamp, which labels them as “Some kind of guitar music from Portland, OR.” Once again, I say hell yeah.
Introductory song “II” kicks off with a tempo-setting guitar lick; essentially a 30-second acclimation to get the listener up to speed before the triumphant bombast of “Work Hard or Suffer Every Day of Your Life,” which itself is only 49 seconds long. The lyrics offer glimpses of beauty to be found out in the world, but these natural blisses are tempered with the knowledge contained in the song’s title that we’ll be stuck either working or suffering for the rest of our lives. As vocalist Cxh barks about trying to be a better person in all walks of life, the guitars point upward in a riff that feels like an angelic counterpoint to the scratchy punk vox.
The immediately following song, “Tenderness,” shows no signs of slowing down, opening with a chuggy circle pit riff that slashes forward as the band articulates the pain of letting down someone that you love. “It’s harder for me, to throw a punch, than take one,” goes one line in the first verse, mirrored by a brief scene in the following verse, “I admire the way you’ve learned to fight / And I’ll be standing at ringside to wrap your hands / With tenderness.”
On the two-part “Ruminate // Ward,” the band plays up their minimalist side, giving the listeners slight breathing room as Cxh spins witchy imagery in their Ian Shelton-esque bark. The 24-second “For Whomever” acts as a sort of mid-album epilogue before the ascendant guitar theatrics of “Softer Sympathetic” bring us up to the stars. There’s another moshpit riff to keep the restless energy coming, almost like they have to pack as many notes into their allotted time as they possibly can, but maybe it’s just because they know what’s coming next. Penultimate track “Great Collision States” offers gruesome car crash imagery as a means of depicting the desire for change and only being met with stagnation. It’s a frustrated and honest song that grapples with much more than the lyrics first let on.
The album’s best moment comes in its final track, “Here Comes the Hurrah,” where every couplet offers a goosebump-inducing morsel of prose as the band spins up one of their more pop-punk-leaning instrumentals. After all’s said and done, the sweat and beer and blood have spilled across the basement floor, It's You! It's Me! And There's Dancing! send the listener off with plenty to think about, including a kiss-off to bad friends, misplaced trust, and the innate power of New Jersey.
This is all on top of the rest of the release’s veiled frustrations at the state of the world. Even from one of the most progressive cities in the country, Portland is still plagued with rampant ICE activity, feckless leaders, and an ineffectual population where some are trying their hardest and others not at all. Tell Me All About It is uniquely Portland, undeniably hard-hitting, and wonderfully emo.
Even with bellowed rough-around-the-edges vocals, there’s still a lot of beauty, brightness, and consolation to be found here. I think when you live in a place as gloomy and demoralizing as Portland, you learn to look extra for those little outcroppings of light. I think when you live in times as dark as these, you have to harness every bit of strength and community you can find. It may only be 14 minutes, but Tell Me All About It offers an outlet, a shoulder, a fist, a shield, and a parade.
