Holiday Traditions, Metalcore Nostalgia, and Worshiping Our Own Past

Now that the holidays are upon us, it’s officially my power season. As much as I am a militant proponent of Having a Summah, Winter is a close second favorite for one reason, and that’s tradition.

Tradition is the all-encompassing, all-important, and infinitely-renewable source of holiday cheer. A celebration of our own past, and the past of our loved ones. It’s the one thing that makes this time of year truly precious and different from any other. Perhaps best of all, “tradition” is entirely unique from person to person; a double helix of reverence for our own history and memories.

Obviously, most people have traditions that they share with loved ones; picking out a Christmas tree, overeating at family dinners, watching specific seasonal movies, etc. Even the most atheistic household in the world probably has something unique that they do around this time of the year, even if it’s just going to the movie theater to avoid crowds. As great as those communal institutions are, I’ve been a staunch believer that the small, self-made traditions are as just as important as the big shared ones.

Tradition as a concept is so important to me that it was one of the first five posts I ever wrote on this site. Since I’ve already got multiple Christmas/year-end posts cooking up (and because I recognize my excitement for the holiday is offputting to some), I’ll instead use this specific write-up to focus on November.

Fueled by nothing but the endorphin rush of nostalgia and slavish devotion to the Christmas spirit, hyper-esoteric rituals begin to leak into nearly every aspect of my life by the time that Halloween is over. I watch specific episodes of TV shows, replay old video games, change the wallpapers on all of my devices, listen to old podcasts, and of course break out the winter music. In fact, one of the primary reasons for my seasonal exuberance is because I’m allowed to revisit music that’s only “acceptable” to listen to during these months.

As much as I love the gigabytes worth of Christmas music in my library, my “Winter music” playlist consists of much more than just on-brand holiday tunes. Over the years I’ve come to fully-embrace being the guy who gets into Christmas as soon as Halloween is over only because it marks the time of year that I get to break these songs out. Like I said, I’m not going to dip into holiday music on here yet. I don’t want to subject you guys to that much Christmas spirit, I’m merely trying to contain myself.

The point is that it would be a disservice to listen to these songs any time besides now, if only because it would make them less special. Obviously “Jingle Bells” would feel weird to listen to in July (and it does sound like a quirky character trait from a Noah Baumbach movie), but there’s just as much, if not more “regular” music that I relegate to the holiday season.

Case in point: the topic of this post. I tend to dip back into my high school-era metalcore around this time of year. Psychoanalyze that all you want, but I’ve now got a fiercely-cultivated playlist culling hundreds of songs from various years of angsty Christmases past. It’s a weird combination, but maybe this music provided me with some counter-programming that combatted both the warm holiday music and cold weather.

You can consider this write-up a bit of a pseudo-sequel to this post from earlier in the year about springtime metalcore. It’s weird because these two seasons are really the only time that I dip back into the genre, but man do I still have a soft spot for it. It’s mainly weird because these songs and albums now fill me with as much joy and holiday happiness as the tonally-inverse Christmas tunes.

At any rate, the same disclaimer on that earlier post applies here: I’m not necessarily proud of any of the music on this list, but it’s a concoction of albums that I find particularly potent. Records that have brought me years worth of happiness, and still have the power to collectively inspire me.

Artifex Pereo - Am I Invisible (2009)

Much like Julien Baker’s 2017 album, Am I Invisible begins with a single, eerie wooden creak. Perhaps belonging to an old floorboard or the frame of a handmade door, this haunted timbered gasp immediately gives the listener a sense of place, as if the entirety of Am I Invisible is settling into your headphones then and there. There’s a brief pause, and then the group’s vocalist Evan Redmon makes his presence known as he belts out the album’s title over a seemingly infinitely-layered vocal take. The remainder of the EP is a 25-minute sample platter that combines the best moments of Kurt Travis and Tilian Pearson-eras of Dance Gavin Dance. The album’s closing track “Neighbors” showcases the band’s already-sharp ear for songwriting, melody, and awe-inspiring emotionally-impactful build-ups. While the group only put out one more release with this early line-up, they still managed to capture something incredibly special on this early EP.

Bring Me The Horizon - Suicide Season (2008)

Back in high school, Bring Me The Horizon’s debut album, Count Your Blessings was the hardest thing I’d ever heard in my life. Filled with bangers like “Braille (For Stevie Wonder’s Eyes Only)” and “(I Used To Make Out With) Medusa” multiple tracks from this album would go on to become genre-defining anthems for this era of the hardcore scene. As you could imagine, the record was an absolute revelation in 2007 and served as the first real brush with deathcore that I’d found palatable at the time. When stacked against the genre-wide impact of their debut, most fans went into the band’s sophomore album with near-impossible expectations.

Softening every aspect from vocals to instrumentation, Suicide Season represents the band’s fully-fledged pivot into a more accessible metalcore sound. While it initially fell flat for me, something kept calling me back to Suicide Season, and in 2017 it’s now my favorite album of the entire genre. Filled with immaculately-produced songs of bile and aggression, tracks like “Diamonds Aren’t Forever” have come to represent the absolute best that this scene has to offer. While the band has continued on a path toward an increasingly-accessible sound, Suicide Season is an achievement that remains an untouched peak of 2000’s metalcore.

A Bullet for Pretty Boy - Revision:Revise (2010)

Hailing from East Texas, A Bullet for Pretty Boy’s debut album is a near-perfect Woe, Is Me doppelganger. Featuring punchy driving instrumentation, tight glitchy drumming, and absolutely crushing breakdowns, every track on Revision:Revise is a pointed showcase of each band member. Guitarist Derrick Sechrist belts out catchy clean choruses, alternating vocal duties with Danon Saylor whose throat-shredding screams impress their weight upon the listener’s consciousness.

While each track is thoughtfully put-together, the album’s definitive performance comes in its final six minutes on “I Will Destroy the Wisdom of the Wise.” The track, which initially made its debut on the band’s 2008 demo, finds new life here thanks to two years of instrumental honing, and a newly-added Tyler Carter feature. It’s quite hard to oversell exactly how much I love this track, but up until last year the song had the unique distinction of my most-played song of all time, and if 200 listens isn’t a commendation then I don’t know what is.

“I Will Destroy the Wisdom of the Wise” is my single favorite song of the entire metalcore genre, my wonderful discovery, and lone takeaway after years of embedding myself in the scene. Every element of the song is immaculate, a marvel to have been captured and recorded in such a flawless state, forever encased in unchanging code. Every word is considered, the drumming is ferocious, every moment is well-placed, and the Tyler Carter feature is the vocal cherry on top of an already delicious sundae. A triumph of the genre.

Chiodos - Illuminaudio (2010)

Fronted by the inimitable Craig Owens, Chiodos was a trailblazing post-hardcore band whose 2005 sophomore album All’s Well That Ends Well served as an entry point to the post-hardcore genre for millions of listeners. In late 2009 Chiodos announced their intention to carry forward as a band without Owens, publicly ousting one of the genre’s most seminal figureheads. Skeptical, cautious, and apprehensive, most fans went into the band’s following album with their guard up; how could the next guy possibly stack up? Like many other fans, I assumed I’d be over the band given the major pivot the comes with the changing of vocalists. In late October of 2010, a friend gave me an impassioned plea to give Illuminaudio a listen, and man am I glad he did. The record is a sprawling, conceptual, and voracious release that aimed high and still managed to surpass every possible expectation.

Much like his predecessor, Brandon Bolmer finds himself handling both clean and screamed vocals throughout the project, managing to reach both high-pitched Owens-esque croons and deep, soul-puncturing screams. The guitar and bass both sound full and rich, providing the perfect counterpoint to Tanner Wayne’s tightly-wound drum patterns. To put it simply, everything is on-point because the band wanted to prove their mettle now that the main star had left. Not only did Chiodos succeed, but they also created the best album in the band’s history and another one of my favorites in the metalcore genre. Owens’ eventual return in 2012 turned Illuminaudio into the unwanted black sheep of the Chiodos family, but in a way that makes this record all the more one-of-a-kind. Truly lighting in a bottle.

Crimson Armada - Guardians (2009)

With unrelenting vocals, and brutal machine gun-like instrumentation Crimson Armada’s debut album is a little rough around the edges but worth revisiting. The album’s title track “Guardian” alternates from fierce rapidly-spit screams to deep skull-crushing breakdowns. Similarly, “The Sound, The Flood, The Hour” is an absolutely punishing and ruthless track with a surprising amount of melody and musicality (once you adjust to the band’s vocals).

Dance Gavin Dance - Acceptance Speech (2013)

Far and away the most recent album on this list, Acceptance Speech released in the fall of my third year of college. While I’d largely grown out of the post-hardcore scene by 2013, Dance Gavin Dance remains the one group from the genre that I still listen to regularly. After numerous lineup changes, Acceptance Speech marked the band’s first release of its current incarnation featuring Tides of Man’s Tilian Pearson on vocals.

The album kicks off aggressively with “Jesus H. Macy,” luring long-time fans into a sense of familiarity with Jon Mess’ screamed vocals. The album is home to some of the band’s most experimental tracks like a crushing riff on “Carve,” chopped-up vocals on “Demo Team,” and the remix-ready “The Jiggler.” The album also hosts one of the strongest closers that the band has ever had on an album, making for a nice bookend of screamed Mess vocals.

While I didn’t think much of it at first, Acceptance Speech grew to be my favorite from the band. The entire record has a beautiful feeling uniformity and wholeness to it, making for one of the most pointed albums in the band’s discography. The whole thing has a wonderful haze to it, like it’s been filtered through a cold December night in the city. There are warm glowing lights, and you can practically see the steam rising off the band as they play. It was proof that Dance Gavin Dance wasn’t going to let one member stop them. I’m glad that they’ve continued with this lineup for so many fantastic releases now because this album only represented a new creative peak that the group set for themselves.

A Day To Remember - And Their Name Was Treason (2005)

A Day To Remember made a name for themselves in 2005 by embracing a unique mixture of metalcore leanings and bouncy pop-punk influences. While later albums are far more polished, fleshed-out, and nuanced, there’s something undeniably charming about the group’s debut. Every band member is still so young and green here, it’s endearing and inspiring to hear such a massively-successful and influential band in such a rough state.

Starting off aggressively with “Heartless,” the band eventually winds its way to the light with “You Should Have Killed Me When You Had the Chance” and “1958,” songs that offered glimmers of the group’s later brilliance. Even in this underdeveloped, underproduced, and underwritten state, there’s an undeniable appeal and magic at play on And Their Name Was Treason, and it’s easy to see how the band made a career out of jumping from pop-punk choruses to metalcore breakdowns. The first of many successful outings in an incredibly-fruitful career.

Dead and Divine - What Really Happened at Lover’s Lane (2005)

Much like A Day To Remember’s debut album, Dead and Divine’s 2005 EP captures a band in its charming infancy. While their later full-lengths would go on to favor (and hone) a much more aggressive post-hardcore sound, What Really Happened at Lover’s Lane features a softer, more careful approach to the genre. With crisp cleans and deeply-growled screams, each song explodes into brutal crescendos of original storytelling. The band’s masterful approach to the build-up is best exemplified by the album’s closing track “Goodnight, Quiet City,” an acoustic ballad that suddenly erupts into a fierce wall of grief before finishing in an orchestral swell accompanied by piercing anguished growls.

Emarosa - Emarosa (2010)

Things seemed to be trending upward for Jonny Craig in 2010, he’d rejoined Dance Gavin Dance after a two-album absence and mended fences with Emarosa in order to helm the group’s killer sophomore album. While things came off the rails quickly after its release, Emarosa’s self-titled record took every sound developed from the band’s earlierworks and improved on them markedly.

This is the first time the band congealed into a fully-formed, standalone entity. While many of his other projects see Craig’s vocals taking the lion’s share of the spotlight, on this release the band figured out how to fit his singing into the instrumentation in a way that everything folds together into one presentable package. It’s a record of constant forward momentum, and one of the best uses of Craig’s incredibly-distinct vocals.

Issues - Black Diamonds (2012)

Formed after the spiteful dissolution of the groundbreaking Woe, Is Me, Issues features a nearly-identical lineup of musicians with a few welcome additions. The group’s 23-minute Black Diamonds EP officially announced the members reuniting, addressed the previous group’s turbulence, and outlined their resolution to move forward with positivity.

After addressing the extra-musical drama, the remainder of the EP is simply overflowing with unique ideas, bringing dozens of fresh elements to a genre that had become stale within the space of a few years. By infusing metalcore with electronic elements, R&B, pop, hip-hop, and much more, the group managed to create something far greater than the sum of its parts: something wholly original and different in a scene where such concepts are often rejected and deemed unmarketable.

Featuring poppy cleans by Tyler Carter and deep fight-inducing screams from Michael Bohn, Issues added some much-needed excitement to the metalcore scene, and Issues’ originality helped differentiate them not only from their previous group but also from the rest of the genre. Two years later the band had released their first full-length, and an accompanying EP that reworked 8 of the band’s songs into newly-formed acoustic tracks. These acoustic versions managed to breathe new life into these already-great songs while also serving as further proof of the band’s musical versatility. These releases represented a positive turning point in my view of the genre and definitive evidence that there’s room for growth in this industry and in life.

Secret and Whisper - Teenage Fantasy (2010)

As with any other popular music scene, bands are born, break up, and then disappear forever. Throughout the early 2000’s literally hundreds of post-hardcore groups got together, created a Myspace, released some music, and then vanished as quickly as they’d appeared. Of all the bands from this era that released music and died out, the one that I miss the most is Secret and Whisper. If anything, I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that they worked together long enough to leave us something as heartbreakingly beautiful as Teenage Fantasy.

Probably the least “hardcore” of all the bands on this list, this would be my one recommendation to anyone reading this list who is not interested in the scene. It’s one of the most out-there and original approaches to the post-hardcore genre, and an entry I hesitated to include with the other entries on this list.

For 44 minutes Teenage Fantasy shines, glimmers, and brims over the top with fresh ideas. Simultaneously otherworldly and down-to-earth, the album is a glossy and emotional journey into the depths of frontman Charles Furney’s psyche. “Youth Cats” opens the album with a snarling guitar riff and a mythical lyric about the ‘lady of miracles’ who commands the river. Straight out of the gates Furney’s voice is volcanic, straining and stretching, brushing his upper register as the bass bounces back and forth beneath it. “Youth Cats” kicks the entire record off with an unrelenting forward momentum that gives the whole album a sense of immediacy and spectacle.

From there literally every. single. track. hits. Throughout the 44-minute running time the vocals soar, the drums hit hard, and the guitar rumbles, all of which swirl together like paint on a well-worn wooden palette, resulting in one singularly flawless record. Even the slower songs like “Upset Seventeen” have a Daniel Johnston-esque charm to them that make them more personable than nearly every other post-hardcore song you’ve ever heard. There are weird electronic diversions like “Pretty Snarl,” and even typically-boring song topics like love and death are addressed in surprisingly eloquent and thoughtful ways. Sometimes the group ventures out even further than expected, addressing topics like animal testing on “Star Blankets” and drawing parallels between serial killers and stardom on “Famous For a Century.” Everything is handled with a surprising level of tact, but also in a way that nothing sticks out as a poor fit. The entire record is unreal, cavernous, and dream-like. It impacts you once and then slowly envelops your body like warm sand. Truly unlike anything I’ve ever heard before or since. A wonderful and underappreciated masterpiece.

We’re Not Friends Anymore - You Are Television (2010)

Clocking in at a blazing 13 minutes, We’re Not Friends Anymore’s second (and final) EP finds a band that is hungry for success. The vocals explode and smolder, and the instrumentation brings a distinct groove and movement, making for surprisingly danceable tracks that spring to life. It is a breakup album, but one that seems as ready to move on as it is willing to dwell in the past. I’ve never heard anything like it, and the EP’s punctuality makes for a breezy listen that will quickly embed itself in your brain and worm its way to your heart.

This is only an abridged list of my favorites, you can listen to these albums and many others through this Spotify Playlist.

Heartache, Optimism, and Pop-Punk: How The Upsides Changed My Outlook On Life

The best creations are born of pain. A sad consolation prize for the inflicted, the result of life experience and raw suffering. As listeners, we judge music based on how much life and “realness” bleed through it, but we also don’t experience anything in a vacuum. Art is tainted by our own memories and experiences. It’s the reason that two nearly-identical albums can feel so different. It’s the reason you enjoy A while I prefer B. Memory is where it all comes into play, and it’s what we add to art as humans. In experiencing art we inject a bit of our own story in the listening process and add on to the creation in whatever way we can.

This is how our tastes, perspectives, and very personalities are formed: through interaction with both art and the world around us. While a positive experience, association, or context can improve our perception of an album, the inverse can also ruin something that’s otherwise objectively good. Think about any album, movie, or TV show that you used to recover from a breakup. Hell, think about a restaurant that once gave you food poisoning. Whether it’s well-founded or not, there’s probably a negative association and personal bias at play skewing your opinion.

I’m of the school of thought that traditionally “great” music starts as something you don’t necessarily love on the first listen, but becomes better over time. Music with depth and complexity that reveals itself with each subsequent spin. Challenging its consumer to be better. Most of my favorite albums were records that I didn’t think much of (or simply didn’t like) upon first listen, but gradually kept burrowing their way further into my brain.

And while memories often retroactively color our impressions of art, sometimes there are also individual works that are able to overcome our own mental hang-ups. Art that’s so strong it’s able to break through our negative associations and emerge from the other side, still enjoyable.

This combination of growth over time and overcoming an uphill battle of negative associations is one of the reasons that The Wonder Years’ second album The Upsides is one of my favorite records of all time.

From a South Philly Basement

Before I get into weird personal history: some quick background info on the band. Founded in 2005, The Wonder Years are a pop-punk act from Lansdale, Pennsylvania. Following two years of singles, split and EPs the band released their debut album Get Stoked on It! In 2007. Taking queues from the early 2000’s easycore scene, the band’s first record was a keyboard-heavy form of biting pop-punk. Get Stoked is problematic, but also very symptomatic of the year it was made. It’s not a bad record, but it bears very few resemblances to the rest of the band’s work and has been retconned by the band for good reason.

The biggest point against Get Stoked on It! Is that most of the songs were written about generic late-2000’s pop cultural buzzwords. You got a track about a ninja, one about a cowboy, one about zombies, and much more! This is in direct conflict with the band’s later hyper-earnest heart-on-sleeve meditations that pulled from real life experiences and heartfelt emotions (as opposed to funny songs about astronauts). There are still some tracks like “Racing Trains” and “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” that foreshadow some of the band’s future stylistic leanings, but as a whole, the record is much more underdeveloped and juvenile than their later work.

The band would later go on to “decanonize” this release, publicly stating their distaste for it both in interviews and even referencing it in future songs. When a remastered version of the album came out in 2012, lead singer Daniel Campbell said “If you like the record, enjoy the new mixes. If you hate the record, I’m on your side” which is something I’ve seen very few bands do.

Within two years of their first album, original member and keyboardist Mikey Kelly left the band. His departure essentially represented a “soft reboot” for the band which allowed the remaining members to pivot the group’s sound and take their next album into a more “honest” direction. A year after Kelly’s departure the band released their sophomore album The Upsides in 2010, and my life would change forever.

B-rate Version of Me

In 2011 I went through a horrible breakup. It was my first real relationship, and it hit me as hard as you could imagine a 17-year-old being hit. I’d recently got my driver’s license, started my first job, and I was embarking on my final year of high school, so overall it was a turbulent time of change for me. One night midway through February I was spurred to purchase a digital copy of The Upsides on a whim based on a Tweet made by Amazon Music. This is something I never do, but I had just gotten off a shift at my job and wanted to fill the void with blind consumerism. The album was on sale for $5, so even for a cheap 17-year-old, there’s not much to lose at that price. I can’t even remember if I even previewed the album, but for whatever reason, that tweet was well-crafted enough to spur me into a purchase right then and there. I was in the mood for something new.

I downloaded the album, loaded it onto my iPod, hit play, and sunk into it.

I don’t know how well I’ll be able to articulate the particular brand of slacker malaise I was engaging in at this time, but most waking hours that weren’t spent school were spent in my room playing video games listening to podcasts and music. I was pretty much distracting all my senses and escaping from reality as much as humanly possible without the use of drugs or alcohol. I wasn’t depressed, but I was in a state. Nothing really cheered me up, so it was more of an ongoing war of attrition with my own brain.

I credit The Upsides with single-handedly lifting me out of this post-dump funk and getting me back to feeling like myself. With years of reflection, I was being far more dramatic than I’m giving myself credit for, but I guess that’s kinda the point of being seventeen. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it felt like it… until this album came along.

A Pop-Punk Oddessy

Upsides begins with a bait and switch. Most pop-punk detractors dislike the genre for pretty specific (and valid) reasons. Maybe they don’t like the genre’s propensity for bitter lovesick lyrics, or they’re turned off by the whiny vocals, but in most cases, they probably have a cartoonishly-exaggerated version of the scene in their head. Thanks to the genre’s explosion in popularity during the mid-90’s, most people just think the music consists solely of whiny Blink 182-types when that’s not the case. While there certainly is no shortage of nasally lovesick songs, that sound isn’t representative of the entire genre.

For better or worse, Upsides begins with exactly what people would expect from the genre. Within the first seconds of the album’s opening track “My Last Semester” a nasally slightly-filtered Campbell sings over a twinkling electric guitar “I’m not sad anymore / I’m just tired of this place.” Within 15 seconds the singing ceases and the guitar strings sustain. An electric whir emerges from the back of the mix and quickly overwhelms the held guitar notes. Suddenly the entire song, album, and band spin to life, energizing the track with a cacophony of brash drum strikes, a biting guitar riff, and a driving bassline. Campbell, now singing at the top of his lung repeats the first lyrics with an angry vitriolic twist, and with that, Upsides has officially begun.

Those first lines of the album sound stereotypical (great, another white dude talking about how sad he is) but upon closer inspection, they’re actually a beautifully-constructed phrase that flips the listener’s expectations on their head by talking about the futility of those sad feelings. It’s a notion that’s devoid of nostalgia, firmly present, and anxiously self-aware. This specific idea of not letting sadness win is a recurring theme throughout the album that the band circles back to frequently. The mantra comes full-circle on the album’s star-studded closer and is even developed further on subsequent releases. But in this first song, the singer articulates this concept by listing all the reasons he could be sad, but then explains that he opted to find the silver lining in his situation: his music. Campbell would go on to address this later in an interview explaining:

“I thought that I had kind of beaten my issues, but when you struggle with depression or anxiety, you never really win. You always carry it with you and the point I learned isn’t to win. The point is to keep fighting. It turned out that ‘I’m not sad anymore’ wasn’t a victory speech. It was a battle cry.”

The opening line pulls double duty by acting as the album’s thesis statement while also serving as the band’s new mission statement. This represents a far tonal shift from what we last heard on Get Stoked. They’re not the same group of 18-year-olds who were singing about pirates and zombies three years ago. They elude to this with the meta line “college hit those dudes like a ton of bricks.” The band did a lot of growing up since we’ve last heard from them, and they are guided by a new creative north star.

Art Imitates Life

The foundation that the band began to flesh out with this record (and would expand upon over the course of a trilogy of albums) is a style of hyper-intricate, self-referential, and pop-culture-obsessed rock that depicts the good and bad sides of a life well-lived. Early on the band used the term “realist pop-punk” when describing the sound of their artistic rebirth. Call it what you want, but it’s still one one of the most refreshingly honest and true approaches to music I’ve ever heard, and it was an absolute revelation to me at seventeen.

There’s beauty in simplicity, and sometimes real life is more compelling than anything you could ever make up. TWY’s music doesn’t revolve around sweeping epics, chasing material goods, or even the other, it’s all music that’s firmly told from one perspective and all bears the insecurities and imperfections that come with it. The focus of the music varies from song to song, but this singular perspective allows for a cohesive vision that the listener can simultaneously empathize with, and project themselves onto.

Throughout The Upsides, singer Dan “Soupy” Campbell flexes his now-well honed writing ability, making it obvious he’d time between albums studying and working on his craft. One of the most under-appreciated aspects of his style is his acute ability to write minuscule details. Small observations and references that add a layer of specificity that makes the album feel more realized and lived-in. Each line adds onto the story that the listener is building in their head until an entire narrative is formed around the character. You’re fleshing out your own universe built on the language of the album and developing a one-of-a-kind relationship with its narrator.

Sometimes The Upsides tackles big psychological issues like post-college listlessness, relationship dynamics, and even death. At other times they zoom down to view life on a macro level and vignette the little scenes that happen in life like a broken down car or going on a midnight pretzel run to the stand behind your house. Sometimes it’s funny and biting social commentary on the Westboro Baptist Church or the shitty fist-pumping people you meet at parties. It’s an album that encapsulates the life of a post-college 20-something from every possible dimension.

To me, the quintessential song on the album is the Deluxe Edition’s penultimate track “Logan Circle: A New Hope.” The song is a stripped-down reworking of the album’s second track “Logan Circle” that echoes many of the original track’s sentiments but also serves as an incremental update on the life of Campbell. “A New Hope” is redone in a slower, more pensive approach that allows the lyrics and instrumentation to shine through and glisten to their full potential, highlighting both the brilliance of the lyrics and the proficiency of the band members.

The first verse of the original “Logan Circle” contains a lyric that hooked me for the rest of the album: “We just can’t blame the seasons / The Blue Man Group won’t cure depression.” The line resonated with me originally because it’s an obvious Arrested Development reference, but it also doubles as a bit of life advice about optimism and outlook. This all circles back to the cliched idea that this album is something I needed to hear at the time. I wasn’t hopeless, but I needed something hopeful. I needed to be told how to handle these feelings I’d never felt before. I needed to be told how to combat them and move on with my life, and that’s exactly what The Upsides did for me. It was musical therapy.

Emergence

Though I didn’t consider it at the time, I’ve only recently come to realize that pop-punk has been the genre that I’ve listened to for the longest in my life. It’s partly a byproduct of when I was growing up (thanks, mid-90’s) but also it just happened to be one of the first genres that I really explored. As a result, there was something comforting about sinking back into the genre after spending some time away from it. I feel like It’s cheesy to admit an album about not feeling sad helped me stop feeling sad, but Upsides was instrumental in my emergence from sadness in the wake of this first relationship.

It wasn’t just the optimistic messages, it’s that the songs found the optimistic messages in the face of everything else. Feelings of sadness are not invalid, but with enough distance, you realize that there’s no reason for them, there’s nothing to be gained from them, only energy wasted. It was a realistic portrayal of exactly how I was feeling then. And more on-the-nose, the album’s breakup song “Melrose Diner” served as both a validation of my feelings and a cautionary tale about becoming the shitty, bitter ex.

My love for The Upsides grew exponentially with each listen, and within a year it became my most listened-to album of all time, a title that it still retains to this day. In fact, my love for Upsides grew with each subsequent album that the band released as future songs would call back to lyrics contained within their earlier works. By fall of 2011, I’d begun my first term of college and the band had released their third album Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing.

The Upsides marked the beginning of a three album “trilogy” that depict the arc of Campbell’s struggles with anxiety and depression, and with the trilogy’s conclusion in 2013, the band cemented themselves as my favorite act of all time. With three releases that were all equally impeccable, I’ve now spent roughly 12 days of my life listening to the band’s various releases, a number I wouldn’t take back if you paid me.

At the end of the day, The Upsides is one of a handful of albums that changed my life, and there’s no higher praise I can hoist upon it than that. It’s a well-crafted and powerfully intricate release that rewards close listens and spawned its own mythology. It engages the listener in a way that few other pieces of art do. There are lots of albums in my life where I can point to a clearly-defined “before” and “after” period, but Upsides is an album that changed my entire way of being. It shifted my world one step towards a more positive existence, and I can’t thank the band enough for that. It’s a radical powerhouse of a record that I still listen to nearly every week, and I can’t fathom my life in a world without it. It’s a beautiful creation, and the world is a more beautiful place for it.

Thank you for everything, Upsides.

Gateway Indie

On May 20th of 2008, my musical taste changed forever. We (or at least I) tend to discover things in waves. Specifically waves of increasingly-tiered obsession that escalate until I can focus on one thing and one thing only. I’ll find a song I really like, devour the album that it came from, read everything on the band’s Wikipedia page, explore their discography, listen to side projects, see them live, spend exorbitant amounts of money on limited edition vinyl, then (apparently) write about my experience years later.

One of the most important steps in my particular brand of hyper-obsessive fandom is delving deeper into the genre of the band who I’ve recently discovered. Whether it’s simply to contextualize their sound, see if I recognize any of their contemporaries, or just to get a better understanding of the world’s musical history. When one artist’s discography isn’t enough, sometimes the next logical step is to start absorbing everything in their immediate vicinity. It’s a beautiful notion that one album can open the door to a whole new world of music that was previously hidden. It’s how you diversify as a music listener and as a person.

Up until high school, I’d really only explored the genres of classic rock, grunge, and some metal. All pretty standard stuff, especially for a white suburban teen, but it was all music that came out before I was born. In 2008 I discovered a group of albums that opened my eyes to the ever-cool world of indie and, more importantly, paved the way for my interest in both the genre and the contemporary music scene as a whole. As each of these albums near their 10th anniversary I realized that not only have many of them achieved “classic” status within the genre, they were also part of a larger movement for my generation.

Universality

Now that the internet has paved the way for services like iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp, music has become more insular than ever. In 2017 there are entire sects of fans who can be hyper-devoted to one artist or scene that may never intersect with anyone else. Additionally, with the rise of social platforms like forums, Twitter, and reddit fans can live in a bubble… and while it’s great to connect with other fans, it also means the vocal obsessives are more walled-off.

We have fewer “universals” than ever before. Ed Sheeran is one of the best-selling artists in the world right now, but I don’t think I’ve heard a single song of his. Drake is breaking records every week, but if you don’t care about hip-hop, he’s pretty easy to avoid listening to. It’s a byproduct of the ever-splintering media landscape that we’re living in.

So there are positives and negatives, but this splintering is relevant because those “universals” will become fewer and far between as we move forward. Looking beyond music, you have shows like Game of Thrones which is one of the most technically popular and most-talked about shows currently on TV. It consistently shatters its own self-set viewership records, numbers which are worth screaming about in 2017, yet would have gotten a show canceled even 20 years ago. There’s just more to watch, more to do, and more to care about in 2017, so if you don’t want to watch Game of Thrones, you truly don’t have to. This isn’t the 20’s where everyone gathers around the radio for the day’s episode of Little Orphan Annie. I feel like I’m getting off track, but music is this phenomenon multiplied by thousands. Not only are there dozens of alternatives mediums vying for your attention, practically anyone can create music in 2017. There are more alternatives (and therefore fewer commonalities) than ever before.

I feel like we will reach (or perhaps have already hit) a point where there are simply no more universal artists. There’s never going to be another Beatles. Obviously. But looking purely at The Beatles on a scale purely based on audience and cultural impact, there will never be another musical group in the history of the world that reaches the omniscient presence that the Beatles achieved. There were fewer artists to listen to then, fewer ways to create music, and even fewer avenues to discover new music.

As technology has improved, we’ve seen a direct impact on the music industry as an entity. At the same time, we’ve also seen artists effectively harness this power. Groups like Odd Future were pervasive and forward-thinking enough that I (a high school-aged non-hip-hop listener) knew who they were and knew at least a few of their songs. While everyone’s musical journey is a unique story filled with personal discoveries that have influenced their taste, this is really a story about the first universal that I was a part of as it was happening.

I Miss the Old iTunes

Back when iTunes was still relatively new, it was my only source of current music. I would almost instantaneously drain any gift card I was given, using it to cross several songs off my carefully-curated iTunes wish list. I was also fortunate enough to have my Dad’s massive collection of nearly one thousand CD’s at my disposal, but as you could imagine, most of those albums were a decade old at least. That’s why I was a rock fan first: ease of access.

But I always found ways to satiate my hunger for new music. From VH1 to renting CDs one by one from the local library, there were only so many ways to hear new music, even in the mid-2000’s. One of the most unexpected avenues that I took advantage of was the (now sadly-defunct) iTunes Single of the Week Program, which offered exposure to countless contemporary acts one song at a time. It may not have been much, but this program turned me onto dozens of artists and sounds that I wouldn’t have heard otherwise. Through this mishmash of mid-2000’s media, I was able to satiate my budding hunger for new music as a penniless 14-year-old.

That brings us back to the first sentence of this post.

Unbeknownst to me, indie folk was blowing up In 2008. Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago was gaining serious traction a year after its release thanks to the album’s breakout hit “Skinny Love” and in May “Skinny Love” was put up as iTunes’ free song. As with most songs in the program, I’d never heard of the artist, nor had any experience with the genre, but I downloaded it anyway because that’s how hungry I was for new music.

I downloaded the track (no doubt on my family’s bulky oversized 2005 laptop) and synced it onto my iPod immediately. I was floored. I’d never heard anything so delicate. It was catchy (especially for a folk song) but it also had a soft warmth and reserved delivery that was a revelation to me at the time. “Skinny Love” evoked a feeling that was unlike any other music I’d ever heard. I had to have more.

Part of the beauty of the Single of the Week program was how random it was. One week it’d be an electropop song, the next it would be something folky like Bon Iver, and then it would be a latin song. I didn’t necessarily like it all (quite the opposite, in fact) but I listened to it all for the sake of discovery. The fact that these songs were free was just the icing on top of the cake. I had nothing to lose.

I had no idea at the time, but indie folk saw a massive explosion in popularity in 2008 with the rise of acts like Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes, who both released stunning debuts around this time. I didn’t realize that this era of indie had been such a widespread phenomenon until I saw people discussing Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago on its tenth anniversary calling it their “Gateway Indie” album. I liked that phrase, but I didn’t think much of it until I heard the ineffable deep_cuts youtube channel cite both For Emma and Fleet Foxes as “dominating adolescent MP3 players the world over” at this time. Maybe it was just his worldly UK accent, but something clicked for me. I realized this was not only a formative album, era, and sound for myself, but for everyone my age.

Beyond Folk

Later that year I met some of the coolest people in my high school. And by that I don’t mean cool in the traditional sense, they were dork-ass nerds like me, but they were dork-ass nerds with impeccable musical taste. At this point, the edgiest thing I had ever listened to was Nine Inch Nails, but these guys opened my mind to the larger world of indie music. Genres I didn’t even know existed. Sounds I could barely conceive of. This was 10th grade and the albums they showed me would go on to become some of my favorite and most formative of all time.

The first song I remember them playing for me was the opening track to Portugal. The Man’s first album Waiter: “You Vultures!” which was titled “How the Leopard Got Its Spots.” I’m going to stop there for a second just to point out this band/album/song combo was (before hearing the first note) already more experimental and out-there than anything else I’d ever heard up to that point.

“How the Leopard Got Its Spots” is a pokey unpredictable song that almost borders on prog. While Portugal. The Man changes up their sound every album, their debut is easily the most experimental of their discography, still retaining many characteristics of the band’s post-hard predecessor Anatomy of a Ghost. But I didn’t know any of that at the time. I just listened to the song, enraptured by the track’s grungy guitars that paired perfectly with Gourley’s shrill high-pitched singing. The lyrics were obtuse in a Relationship of Command-type way and the final glitched-out chorus haunted me for days after the fact, becoming an immovable earworm. I remember at the time Grand Theft Auto IV had just been released (God, take me back) and I’d spend hours tooling around the game’s gray city listening to this song on repeat for hours.

Sometime later, Eric (the one of the group who I was closest to) and I found ourselves sitting next to each other during a weirdly-placed mid-day homeroom period. I asked him what he was listening to and he said “I’ll show you” he handed me his headphones and hit play on his 3rd generation iPod Nano. What I heard were the first shimmering notes of Minus The Bear’s “Pachuca Sunrise.” The song’s carefully-times guitar taps and intensely-technical drumming provide the crunchy background for Jake Snyder’s laid-back sensual lyrics and Cory Murchy’s smooth flowing bassline. It gelled into a transformative experience that made my body feel warm with sunlight and love. There’s a reason it’s still one of the band’s most-played live songs even a decade later. It turns out “Pachuca Sunrise” was many people’s first Minus The Bear song and led countless fans to the group’s second album Menos El Oso.

At this point, I already had enough “material” to go off on my own and endlessly devour these two records from these two very different bands. And I did, but I was also hungry for more. I came back to this group of guys in our shared AV class and begged for more in the coolest way I could without discounting my own cred.

From there Eric, Oliver, and Max threw me into the deep end. They showed me “Death Rides a Horse” by instrumental band Russian Circles. I dug it. Ratcheting up the intensity, they moved onto “Laser Life” by the post-hardcore band Blood Brothers. I dug it. They then threw the hyperchaotic cybergrind “Chapels” by Genghis Tron at me. I didn’t dig it, but I warmed up to it pretty quickly.

While there were dozens of other acts and songs that these guys turned me onto over the course of the next year, this crop stands out in my mind both for its breadth and what they’ve gone on to represent for me personally.

Portugal. The Man would go onto become one of my favorite bands. I’ve often proselytized online that they have one of the best discographies in indie rock. I would also go on to expose this band to my two younger brothers, and for one of them, Portugal. The Man has become their favorite band of all time. They currently sit at my 8th most played band on Last.fm with just over 3,000 plays.

Minus the Bear was my favorite band for years. At 6 concerts they’re also far-and-away the band I’ve seen live the most, and two years ago I saw them play Menos El Oso in full for the album’s 10th-anniversary tour. The album’s closing track “This Ain’t a Surfin’ Movie” has been my favorite song of all time since I first heard it. The band is currently my 6th most-listened band on Last.fm, and three of the band’s albums are have made it onto my list of all-time favorites.

Russian Circles would eventually lead me to the world of post-rock and instrumental metal. Bands like Explosions in the Sky, Mogwai, and Earth, all of whom have served as my reading and studying music throughout high school and college. Russian Circles also have a nearly-perfect discography, and they currently sit at #15 on my Last.fm.

Meanwhile, Fleet Foxes were always a bit boring to me… until this year. Maybe I have more patience at 24 than I did at 15, but I’ve had their discography on repeat for this entire summer and I’ve been loving it.

Most importantly, Bon Iver served as my gateway to all of this. It’s weird that a slow quiet folk album could pave the way for something as discordant and brutal as Genghis Tron, but I guess it’s a snowball effect type of thing. For Emma, Forever Ago also became somewhat of a soundtrack for my first real relationship, and despite that relationship’s rocky conclusion a year later, I can still listen to the album today and enjoy it as much as I did the first time hearing it.

I can’t thank these three dudes (and the creators of these albums) enough. I can safely say that my life would be unequivocally and vastly different without having gone through this period of exploration when I did. I would be a different person with different tastes and interests entirely. Full stop. So for that, I can only say “thank you” and hope that I returned the favor with someone else somewhere down the line. Sometimes discoveries come from the most unexpected places. Sometimes a random song can lead you down a path you never could have blazed yourself. Sometimes a single song can change everything.

The Crossroads Between Objectivity and Nostalgia

Something I’ve spent the majority of my “adult” life grappling with is the intersection between art and nostalgia. It’s a concept that I’ve only recently come to recognize but has essentially acted as the thesis for this entire blog without me even knowing it. As a result, this post feels like what the past year’s worth of writing on here has been building towards.

Reflecting on my most recent metalcore-infested post I began to think “why do I love these albums so much?” Even within that blog where I’m gushing over these albums, I repeatedly felt the need to clarify that I don’t think they’re great feats of art. Is that because I’m embarrassed of liking them? Probably… But there’s more to it than that.

In that same post, I also talked about my positive (or not-so-positive) memories associated with each album, and I even gave a wine-like pairing of what I was doing while listening to each album. Earlier this week Of Mice & Men surprise released a new song called “Back To Me” with their new line-up sans-Carlile. It’s always a bummer to see someone leave a band (especially due to health-related issues) but it’s also a bummer to hear a band without the member that you held most dear. Listening to the new song led me down a Tidal-binge on the rest of the band’s greatest hits. Over their eight years as a band OM&M have undergone a significant shift in sound, transitioning from breakdown-heavy metalcore, then nu-metal, and more recently full-on buttrock. It’s not a transition I love, but God knows I respect their freedom to chase that artistic dragon. When I pressed play on the band’s 2011 standout O.G. Loko I realized something: when all’s said and done, this track (from an album I’ve barely listened to) didn’t sound all that different from the band’s 2010 album that I hold so dear. Someone coming to the band from an outside perspective would probably find the two indistinguishable.

A brief history of Of Mice & Men

I’ll be the first to admit metalcore is a genre that breeds repetition and cookie-cutter behavior. Fans know what they want, and most bands are happy to give it to them. That’s another one of the reasons I respect OM&M’s shift toward nu-metal and away from their origins: it’s a risk. At the end of the day, there’s not that much of a different between the band’s first album and the second. The difference for me was that I listened to the first ravenously during an awesome time in my life, and only listened to the second a few times at most. There’s probably someone a year my junior who feels the exact same way about the band’s second album compared to their third. And so on and so forth.

To get away from metalcore (and back to myself) I’ve spent the last several months ranking and re-ranking my favorite albums of all time. Some of the categories like classic rock were easy. Not only because it’s a genre I’ve been listening to my entire life, but those albums and songs have saturated our culture for decades. There’s some sort of rough consensus in the collective unconscious that The Beatles are great… and you know what? I agree. Because of this weird conflux of pop culture, history, and personal experiences, I can easily say that Abbey Road is not only my favorite Beatles album, it’s also an incredible piece of art that I feel no shame (or risk) in elevating on a high pedestal.

Then I look at hip-hop. The genre’s been around since long before I was born, but it was a genre I only started to personally engage with a few years ago. As a result, most of my favorite hip-hop albums are from that exact time frame. I know they’re not all “incredible” (at least not as incredible as Abbey Road) but part of that is recognizing my own inexperience with the genre. I know, I know, I know there’s older hip-hop I need to listen to that are essentially as “classic” as Abbey Road, but it takes time and effort to become fluent in a genre. I have barely listened to Jay-Z, UGK, Madvillain, Biggie, 2 Pac, and a whole host of other artists that I know are great. It’s like that guy who hasn’t watched Star Wars. He knows it’s a good movie, but you incredulously asking “Seriously? You haven’t watched STAR WARS?” just discourages him. 

I recently watched Casablanca for the first time a week ago (shout out to Mother’s Day). That’s a movie that’s frequently held up with Citizen Kane and Godfather as “literally the best movie of all time.” For years I’ve known that it’s great. It’s been on my “to watch” list… and you know what? It was pretty good. What can I add to the conversation about Casablanca that hasn’t been said before besides ‘yep, everyone was right, it is really good.’ There are other movies like Fight Club and From Dusk Till Dawn that I recognize aren’t peaks of cinematic triumph or artistic feats like Casablanca is, but you know what? I like them more. I like them more because I’ve seen them more, I’ve had more time to digest them, and I have more positive memories tied to them. That doesn’t mean they’re better than Casablanca, but I like them far more.

Back to music. 

In creating that list of my favorite albums I’ve fudged a lot of genres, added categories, and made incredibly arbitrary distinctions, all because I wanted to fit more albums on there. I don’t put all those genres or albums on the same level. My favorite metalcore album does not stack up to my favorite classic rock album, that’s comparing apples to oranges. Or apples to pool cues.

A separate conversation within this is exactly how long an album should take to be placed among your “favorites.” And even more: what about an album that’s new to you, but “classic” within its own field?

Up until this year… Hell, up until a couple months ago, I’d never listened to The Strokes debut album Is This It. Until 2017 the only three Strokes songs I’d heard were “Reptilia” (shoutout Rock Band 1), “New York City Cops” (shoutout iTunes DJ, you will be missed), and “When It Started” (shoutout Spider-Man 1 soundtrack). Ironic since “New York City Cops” and “When It Started” were swapped on the US version of Is This It due to 9/11… but I’m getting wildly off-topic here.

Pictured: A bastion of high art

---

The point is that it took me seventeen fucking years to listen to one of the greatest “indie” records of my lifetime… But is it fair for me to claim that? Sure I like Is This It a lot, but I’ve only listened to it about 10 times according to last.fm. So is consensus swaying my perception? Is two-decade-old critical acclaim forcing me to enjoy an album more than I really do? Is personal shame making me think higher of the record than I should be? Maybe, but I don’t think so. Is This It is great, no matter how you cut it. Removed of nostalgia, I enjoyed it and continue to play it every couple days.

Meanwhile, another album that didn’t quite make the cut into my favorites list was 2016’s Psychopomp by Japanese Breakfast. It’s an album that I adore, but (again) I’ve only had a handful of months to really sit with the album and let it marinate. As much as I wanted to say ‘this is one of my favorite indie albums’ I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. This is an album I’ve listened to more than the Strokes, yet it didn’t carry the acclaim of “definitive album of the 2000’s” and thus I didn’t feel comfortable ranking it up against the classics. Same with Car Seat Headrest’s Teens of Denial. I love the album, but I don’t feel comfortable enough with my personal feelings toward it, nor its place in history to confidently place it amongst my favorites of all time.

I’ll admit I’m overthinking all this. All these albums and movies are great, and at the end of the day, nobody really gives a shit about my “list” or ranking of these albums. Yet this is a concept I’ve been struggling with lately on an artistic level. How can you stack an album that you’ve been listening to for a decade up against anything else? How can a movie that been heralded as the greatest of all time (for 75 fucking years) really compare to anything that I’ve seen a dozen times? How do you even begin to compare the two? 

To bring this full-circle (and give a total cop-out answer) I think the answer is a case of “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.” Those two OM&M albums are great. I think they’re an acquired taste for sure, but an outsider to the genre would probably hear two songs next to each other and probably think ‘these are different songs?’ 

I think all these qualifiers are sliders. Personal history. Critical acclaim. History. Context. Time. are inextricable from art. I guess I’d argue the art can still be judged on its own in a vacuum, but that’s not how anyone judges it… ever. We hear, see, and experience things on our own terms.

I guess if anything I’m arguing that personal history (nostalgia) is one of the most powerful influencers when it comes to my interpretation and experience of art. I use music like a time-traveling drug. You know that feeling when the holidays hit and you hear “Silent Night” for the first time? I have a calendar year’s worth of songs like that. I have albums that bring me back to distinct times, years, and moments in my life. I love that art can do that. I love that this coming August I can put on Frank Ocean’s Blonde and it will transport me directly back to Summer 2016. That kind of personal connection to music is something that can (sadly) never be duplicated. The beautiful part is that we all have our own narratives like that. We all have a list of albums… or movies…. or food… or podcasts… or whatever that evoke something within us. I’m just far more obsessive about documenting my own. 

My own history. My own context. Some far-off part of my own mind is the reason that I don’t like one Of Mice & Men album as much as it’s nearly-identical predecessor. Unfortunately, that conflux is something that can never be fully translated or explained no matter how hard we try. That unique perspective is the one thing we share, even if nothing’s shared. And that’s what we bring to art. That little piece of us that adds onto to something that’s already an inherently human and beautiful and pure creation. It’s what makes art beautiful. It’s what makes the world beautiful.

The Hidden Beauty of High School Metal

I am not a cool person.

Despite concerted efforts to highlight my exceptional taste, willingness to branch out, and seek artistic alternatives within overcrowded frameworks, I’m just a nerd. Anyone who knows me in real life can attest that I’m in fact not the cool person (ironically) pictured above. Actually, this blog is as much about my own embarrassing history and musical hangups as it is trying to turn people onto good things. The point is it’s all kinda good, you might just need to shift your perspective, lower your expectations, or revert your brain to a child-like state to enjoy them.

This write-up is definitely one of those. Don’t expect any discussion on “traditionally good” music, thoughtful insight, or analysis of the new Kendrick Lamar album. Make no mistake, this is all embarrassing shit.

A few months back I tried to compile a list of my favorite albums of all time. What originally started as a top ten list quickly evolved into an amalgam of over 100 albums spanning dozens of genres. From the first time I heard AC/DC at 11, to high school heartbreak, to collegiate celebration, this document is a comprehensive look at my taste and who I am as a person.

While the hip-hop section needs some diversification, I’m pretty happy with the general makeup of this look at my musical soul. One of the biggest sources of shame, however, is the “metalcore” category. It’s a genre that I listened to all the way through high school and has become taste-defining for better or worse. Metalcore is a very “seasonal” genre for me, and with spring officially upon us in Oregon, I’ve recently broken out a handful of these records and found myself falling back in love with them.

I’ll be the first to admit that this is almost fully nostalgia. I don’t think these albums are high art, or even worthy of the praise that I’m about to heap upon them, but they bring me back. You know what I was doing in 2009? Enjoying life. I had my first real girlfriend, I was walking to school every day in the warm sunlight with a (now sadly discontinued) Quaker Oatmeal To Go bar in-hand. I was listening to this music, my friends were listening to this music, and it was a scene that I cared about deeply. It was a healthy way to let out teenage angst, and it felt like a genre that was “alive,” with new bands and ideas popping up regularly… Honestly very similar to how I feel about the hip-hop scene right now. But in high school metalcore was just unknown enough and just unpopular enough for me to fully rally behind. It informed my personality, my clothes (shout out to Hot Topic), and absolutely served as the soundtrack to these four formative years in my life.

A Skylit Drive - Adelphia

Adelphia is the sophomore effort of Californian metalcore band A Skylit Drive. Fronted by abnormally-high-pitched singer Michael “Jag” Jagmin, Adelphia allowed the band time to take a more structured, varied, and thoughtful approach to their songwriting which improved markedly on the band’s earlier sound. The combination of Brian White’s screamed vocals with Jag’s nearly-feminine singing is an intoxicating mix that (when paired with the tight instrumentation on this record) made for ASD’s most memorable record.

Pair with: Gears of War 2 King of the Hill on Pavilion

Of Mice & Men - Of Mice & Men

Of Mice & Men began with a blistering cover of “Poker Face” uploaded to Myspace in early 2009 (in case you needed a reminder of where we’re at in time). After being kicked from electronicore band and crabcore creators Attack Attack!, screamer Austin Carlile embarked on a new venture named after the Steinbeck novel of the same name (cleverly differentiated with an ampersand). Within a year of the Gaga cover, OM&M had dropped their eponymous full-length album to critical acclaim. Clocking in at a little over 30 minutes, Of Mice & Men is an unflinching album that rides on the coattails of Carlile’s throat-shredding vocals, as best exemplified by the closing track’s final minutes.

Pair with: post-work drives to nowhere in particular

I See Stars - 3-D

Perhaps most embarrassing of anything on this already-embarrassing list, I See Stars is a techno-influenced metalcore act from Ohio. Comprised entirely of teenagers at the time, I See Stars released their debut album 3-D in April of 2009. With song names that alluded to Fight Club and Shell Silverstein, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more Taylor-Grimes-tailored album in 2009. Everything about this album, from the keyboard-infused breakdowns to the inexplicable Bizzy Bone feature just clicks for some inexplicable reason. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures… but there’s definitely music I listen to that I wouldn’t play in the presence of others, and 3-D is one of those.

Pair with: 7 am springtime walks to high school while enjoying an aforementioned Oatmeal Bar

In Fear and Faith - Voyage

In Fear and Faith stand alone as one of the most unique bands on this list due solely to their instrumentation. This genre reuses the same sounds, themes, and ideas so much that it became cookie cutter within a few years of its explosive growth at the end of the 2000’s. In Fear And Faith presented an alternative: a metalcore act that centered around a theme (pirates of all things) and more importantly the Niroomand brothers Mehdi (drums) and Ramin (guitars and piano). Ramin’s keys alone added a level of composition and sophistication that was unlike anything else in the genre at the time. Their debut Ep Voyage remains my favorite release of theirs, but their second EP Symphonies highlights the absurd talent of the Niroomand brothers.

Pair with soaking up the sun and basking in the insanely violent X-Men Origins: Wolverine game (which was better than it had any right to be).

Broadway - Kingdoms

The enigmatic (and hard to Google) Broadway is a metalcore band that takes queues from pop-punk and tackles a variety of relationship issues from the perspective of the band’s high-pitched singer and screamer Misha Camacho. The band’s debut album Kingdoms follows the exact beats of a relationship that’s in the process of falling apart and served as the perfect medium for me to project my own relationship strife onto at the time of its release.

Pair with: sadly playing Metro 2033 in the midst of a breakup.

Alesana - The Emptiness

Speaking of breakup albums, Alesana’s The Emptiness was my go-to album for a sad spring break trip to the Oregon coast. The Emptiness is a concept album loosely based around a mishmash several of Edgar Allan Poe stories told through Shawn Milke’s shrill clean vocals and Dennis Lee chilling screamed vocals. This cinematic and aggressive retelling of a failed relationship was exactly what I needed to hear at the time.

Pair with: a sad, rainy Oregon coast.

We Came As Romans - To Plant A Seed

We Came as Romans were one of my first few “real deal” concerts (i.e. going with a group of friends and not my parents). Experiencing the rawness, energy, and passion of this genre firsthand was a life-affirming experience that solidified the genre’s legitimacy for me. We Came As Roman’s debut album To Plant a Seed features 10 vaguely-religious tracks that delicately balance Kyle Pavone’s autotuned cleans with Dave Stephens’s low growls. Being within 20 feet of the entire band as the music faded and the entire venue joined in on the opening track’s group chant was a magical moment I’ll never forget.

Pair with: a crowded, sweaty Hawthorne Theater

Miss May I - Apologies Are For The Weak

Last but not least, we have Miss May I’s debut album Apologies are for the Weak. This tightly-honed metalcore album is biting and unrelenting enough to hold your attention, but just lyrically veiled enough to serve as background music when you need it to be. The defining moment is the breakdown in “Forgive and Forget” accompanied with clean vocals of all things.

Pair with: learning to drive in the early Oregon Summer in between fits of GTA IV.

---

I don’t think these albums are high art. I don’t think they’re the greatest of all time. Hell, I don’t even think they’re the greatest within their own genre. My favorite season is always whatever one we’re currently in the midst of, and this spring has simply brought out an immense happiness in me. Partially because of the sun, and partially because I can revisit all these albums again, if only for a few months. They’re special because I only listen to them a handful of times a year. Sure they inform my taste, personality, and a very distinct time in my life, but it’s nice to be able to revisit those memories. Even if they only evoke split-second pangs of beauty and happiness, this grouping of albums served as the soundtrack to a formative time in my life, and what are we if we don’t appreciate where we’ve come from? That’s something to treasure and hold close, no matter how embarrassing.