The Best of March 2021

Here are my favorite albums and EPs released in the month of March. This is probably the most emo collection of releases I’ve ever written about in any monthly roundup, so consider yourself warned. 

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Tigers Jaw - I Won’t Care How You Remember Me 

Hopeless Records

The day before Tigers Jaw released their sixth studio album, I published a piece laying out the band’s position as both a legacy emo act and as artists who are constantly growing. That article focused primarily on my history with Tigers Jaw, specifically their breakthrough self-titled album that so many fans hold up as a landmark of the emo genre. The band’s output since then has ranged from solid to excellent, but nothing since 2008 has quite hit the same melancholic feelgood tone as their sophomore album… until now. Asking bands to make the same album over and over again is a fruitless (and unfulfilling) prospect for both parties, but on I Won’t Care How You Remember Me, the Pennsylvania four-piece managed to create a record that’s as catchy and triumphant as the album that so many fans consider their “best.” The release opens with an acoustic introduction that slowly draws you in before bottoming out into a fully-fledged pop-punk banger. The album’s front half is stacked singles all bearing sticky choruses, hard-hitting guitars, and glowing keys. Whether it’s the beguiling “Cat’s Cradle” with its siren song synth or “Hesitation” with its sunny springtime riffage, the album never lets up for a second. Even the back half of the record shakes things up with spitfire deliveries and a stellar closer, all of which seem ready to soundtrack springtime adventures and sunny hikes. A return to form in the best way possible. 

Biitchseat - I’ll Become Kind. 

Refresh Records

I’ll Become Kind is a heartfelt EP about the vastness of emotion and the constantly-shifting nature of relationships. While those topics sound complex and heavy in theory, Biitchseat has a way of making these amorphous subjects sound as light and easy as talking to a childhood friend. Lead single “Anti-Depressed” features a high-flying chorus made up of conflicting feelings. Perfectly representative of the band’s style, “Anti-Depressed” is one of those songs that’s carefree and singable until you actually sit down and listen to the words. With a style that feels inspired by fellow Ohioans Snarls and Sonder Bombs, the four tracks on I’ll Become Kind act as a reminder that in order to better ourselves, sometimes we have to take a long, hard look at the bad stuff. Then it’s off to the skatepark.

Home is Where - I Became Birds 

Knifepunch Records

Somewhere between the Bermuda Triangle of Neutral Milk Hotel, Snowing, and Bob Dylan lies Home is Where. The album(?) opens and closes with a rustic campfire guitar, but is packed with horns, harmonica, violin, and more on top of all the usual guitar, drums, and bass. As lead singer Brandon MacDonald’s nasally yelp guides the listener along each dynamic track, the topics range from lighting cops on fire to assassinating presidents. For me, the heart of the album comes in the form of “Sewn Together From the Membrane of the Great Sea Cucumber,” where a steady guitar pairs with an escalating drum build. At the same time, a group chant repeats, “look at all the dogs! / look at all the dogs! / I wanna pet every puppy I see!” before throwing to an old-school screamo breakdown. It’s both charming and unexpected, a violent roller coaster of emotions that feels like it’s one screw away from falling apart at any moment. There are also harmonica hoe-downs, snappy pop-punk cuts, and hard-charging Dogleg-like passages that sound tailormade for driving down the highway at 90 miles an hour. Each consecutive minute of I Became Birds keeps you guessing. You never know whether the song is about to devolve into a tappy emo anthem or a high-pitched screamo tantrum. Easily the best emo release of the year so far.  

glass beach - alchemist rats beg bashful (remixes) 

Run For Cover Records

Much like 100 gecs’ Tree of Clues, glass beach’s alchemist rats beg bashful is a victory lap. The hour-plus remix album sees the proggy emo wizards handing over their debut album to a host of collaborators and conspirators from every genre under the sun. The results range from faithful recreations, ecstasy-fueled EDM, and Daft Punk-indebted house… and that’s just the first three songs. For what could have easily been written off as “just” a remix album, alchemist rats feels like a genuine celebration. It feels like a band finding their community, raising them up, and rallying around each other, fans included. The diversity of sounds found on this record is a testament to both the skills of the artists remixing the songs and the brilliance of the source material. Plus there’s a Dogleg contribution, so I was sold before I even hit play.

Riley! - Already Fucked 

Chillwavve Records

Listening to Already Fucked is like catching up with a friend who has had one too many cold brews. The record opens with an instrumental rumble as lead singer Ryan Bluhm affects an announcer’s voice while introducing the band by name. The end result strikes a balance somewhere between the pre-set excitement of a DIY show and the explosive bombast of a professional wrestling match. After this enthusiastic welcome, the band quickly shuffles through everything on their mind without much time for a breather. As you listen to the band move from talking about time signatures to high school reunions and the failures of capitalism in the same punky sneer, half of the fun is just keeping up. 

Harmony Woods - Graceful Rage 

Skeletal Lightning

If Already Fucked is like listening to a friend unload all their anxious thoughts on you in-person, then Graceful Rage is like reading someone’s diary. It’s an album concerned with excavating deep wells of emotions through everything from soaring Julien Baker ballads to bratty pop-punk rippers. Lead singer Sofia Verbilla achieves this through confessional songwriting featuring a blend of obsessively-fixated realist observations and poetic inward reflection. These realizations are soundtracked with emo-flavored indie rock instrumentals featuring embellishments of horns, cello, and lap steel, all filtered through production courtesy of the wonderful Bartees Strange. The culmination of all these feelings arrives in the penultimate title track as Verbilla belts,  “Graceful rage is all that suits me these days,” striking a precise balance between beauty and anger; a perfectly acceptable resting state for 2021. 

Future Teens - Deliberately Alive 

Take This To Heart Records

Each release from Future Teens has been immaculately titled. Hard Feelings? A perfect label for the emotions that flow from the weird half-adult struggles of your early twenties. Breakup Season? Another snappy, clever, and self-explanatory name for the waves of doom that seem to cut through multiple relationships every fall. Even last year’s Sensitive Sessions is a beautifully indicative (and alliterative) name for what’s ostensibly “just” an acoustic EP. Now, the Boston-based bummer pop group is back with Deliberately Alive, an apt way to describe how we’ve all been operating for the past year or so. We all feel tired and overwhelmed. We all feel some sense of regression or not keeping pace. Our relationships with others have been strained or warped, and we’ve all found different ways to cope. Every day, we have to make the deliberate decision to live, Future Teens just found a way to call that out in the most catchy manner possible. The best part is, after four tracks of emotionally exhaustive yet cleverly written rock, the band caps the release off with a Cher cover. Just beautiful. 

Bicycle Inn - THIS TIME AND PLACE IS ALL I’LL EVER KNOW 

Suneater Records

While the young upstarts at Suneater Records have made a name for themselves off jittery zoomer emo, variety is the spice of life, and Bicycle Inn is adding some much-needed spice to the label’s lineup with their debut album. Watching the recent waves of emo roll in has been exciting because it genuinely feels like a new golden age in a genre that can quickly become stale, repetitive, and derivative. That said, sometimes you just want to return to basics. There’s something comforting in familiarity, and bands who can put their own spins on an old sound are bound to become quick favorites of mine. Groups like Short Fictions and Barely Civil who are heavily inspired by a distinct style of fourth-wave emo, yet still bring something new to the table. That’s my sweet spot, and that’s why I was immediately drawn to this record. With THIS TIME AND PLACE IS ALL I’LL EVER KNOW, Bicycle Inn are adding their names name to that list by way of a stellar debut that isn’t afraid to be unabashedly emo.

Brown Maple - I Never Really Learned How To Say Goodbye. 

Chillwavve Records

Despite opening with a Scott Pilgrim sample, I Never Really Learned How To Say Goodbye is better than your run-of-the-mill emo release. I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a good riff, but the tapped guitar line that opens “Swiss Cheese” is easily the best I’ve heard all year. In this song, the band navigates their way through sorrowful sentiments of heartbreak and loss, eventually riffing their way up to a cathartic group chant that sounds downright Marietta-esque. If you’re a fan of emo, you know that’s just about the highest praise one can ascribe to a band. Lead single “Merry Go Round” works its way up to a similar outpouring as the band jostles the listener around with a moshpit-inspiring instrumental that’s reminiscent of the breakdown at the end of “Death Cup.” Despite name-dropping two of the most influential groups in modern emo, Brown Maple still manages to feel like their own entity with a unique sound and a story worth telling. 

Quick Hits

Arab Strap - As Days Get Dark - The slow-talking Scots are back with their first album in 16 years, a noir-flavored look at the dark side of humanity. 

Adult Mom - Driver - Inside you, there are two wolves. One is gay, one is sad. 

A Day To Remember - You’re Welcome - A soulless, cash-grabby, Imagine Dragons-wannabe release from the band that used to be a paragon of the pop-punk/easycore scenes.

Drake - Scary Hours 2 - It’s more Drake. 

IAN SWEET - Show Me How You Disappear - Ethereal, witchy, waif relationship songs. 

Dollar Signs - Hearts of Gold - This album is to Jeff Rosenstock what Muppet Babies is to The Muppets. This is a compliment. 

Really From - Really From - Minimalist, improvisational, and horn-heavy emo-ish indie rock.

America Part Two - Price of a Nation - Like a spiritual successor to Valient Thorr, Price of a Nation mixes high-pitched snotty vocals and hard-charging garage rock for an energetic debut album.

Michigander - Everything Will Be Ok Eventually - Fantastic folk that’s consistently catchy.

Citizen - Life In Your Glass World - A dancy and heartfelt pivot from the kings of emo Tumblr.

The Antlers - Green to Gold - The first record in seven years from the iconic indie rock act is a little slower and a little more pensive than their previous work but still hits just as hard.

Nagasaki Swim - The Mirror - Acoustic-led bedroom rock that still manages to sound huge.

Gengis Tron - Dream Weapon - Once the go-to grindcore act of my high school music fandom, now the synthy post-hardcore reunion album of my late-20s.

KALI MASI - [laughs] - Beautiful, powerful, and well-constructed emo in the vein of Microwave of ManDancing.

Music, Life, and Tigers Jaw: How We Remember Music

As I write this, I’m listening to “Hesitation,” a single off the Tigers Jaw’s upcoming album I Won't Care How You Remember Me. My history with Tigers Jaw is long and winding, but the tl;dr version is that I (like many other people) have a soft spot for their self-titled album. While I have come to adore Charmer and think spin has some undeniable bangers, nothing the band has ever made since 2008 has quite reached the peak of that landmark emo album… but why? 

As I listened to the first few seconds of “Hesitation,” I was able to suspend my disbelief and, just for a moment, hear an emo riff that would have sounded perfectly at-home on that pizza-adorned favorite of mine. “Hesitation” itself is great, but hearing such an evocative piece of guitarwork made me realize that even if we get a better Tigers Jaw album than the self-titled record, we’ll never get another Tigers Jaw album that hits quite the same. 

Tigers Jaw is an immensely personal album to me, and I know I’m not alone in that. The band’s top songs on Spotify pull largely from their 2008 release. For some fans, it evokes long-lost decade-old memories of high school nights spent with friends or the sweat-and-beer smell of DIY shows. For me, the band’s self-titled record is forever tied to a very specific and formative spring term in college. I think the songs are great, obviously, but I only recently realized how much those subjective feelings inform my love for the album. 

Hearing the opening notes to “The Sun” instantly takes me back into a time of my life where everything seemed to be turning around, and it made me realize nobody else has those memories. Nobody else listens to Tigers Jaw and feels the exact way I feel. We may hear the same choruses and see the same sentiments captured in the songs, but nobody feels the exact weird mix of emotions I experienced that spring term. Nobody hears “Plane vs. Tank vs. Submarine” and thinks about studying beat poetry for their English class. No Tigers Jaw fan hears “Never Saw It Coming” and can conjure to mind the strange melancholy I felt on that one weird train ride home after a bad day. Not a single soul associates “Meals On Wheels” with the optimistic feeling of basking in the sun after a long, cold, rainy Oregon winter and feeling a sense of self-assuredness for the first time in years. Those are all me. Those are all Tigers Jaw.

My point is I love Tigers Jaw not just because it’s a great album but because it is synonymous with a very important time in my life. No other Tigers Jaw album, no matter how good, will ever broach that strange mix of musical excellence and nostalgia. Tigers Jaw is encased in amber. It’s trapped in time. It’s something that can never be reclaimed, recreated, or bested. 

I’m incredibly excited about the new Tigers Jaw album. I’m happy they’re still around, and I’m glad they’re still putting out incredible music after a decade and a half together as a band. It’s just odd to hear something like that opening riff on “Hesitation,” which sounds like a familiar memory yet is completely new. It’s a strange sense of musical and emotional deja vu. It made me realize that I Won't Care How You Remember Me will eventually be someone’s Tigers Jaw. Somebody will listen to these songs, fall in love with them, and forever associate them with a specific and important time in their life. 

That power of association is an extraordinary aspect of music that can make things unfair at times. As an artist, it’s unfair that you can never recreate something that appeals to a fan in the exact same way, just in a different way. The songs on I Won't Care How You Remember Me might grow associations that I look back on as fondly as the songs on Tigers Jaw, but I won’t know until I look back on them with an equivalent amount of time. Right now, it just feels like “New Tigers Jaw” versus “Old Tigers Jaw,” but it’s important to remember that there’s also a decade-plus worth of memories that comes with the latter one. It’s apples and oranges. 

That phenomenon of musical nostalgia is also unfair as a fan. You can never explain quite why an old album appeals to you. Yes, you can share the songs, break down the lyrics, analyze the instrumentation, and use beautiful flowery language to impart the feeling that it gives you. Still, you will never be able to explain the complex web of associations and sentimentality you feel when listening to it. It’s sad because nobody will ever relate to these songs in the exact same way, yet the cool thing is that you can still find a way to relate.

That’s what makes music writing fun. Reviewing music is just a writer attempting to explain how a song or album makes them feel before those associations set in. Over time, everyone will form their own unique opinions of, feelings on, and relationships with the music that are all unreplicable. It makes this job hard because I can never completely explain what Tigers Jaw means to me, but it fills me with a strange sense of awe and optimism knowing that someone will be experiencing their own version of those feelings with I Won't Care How You Remember Me. It makes me think about the infinite number of feelings and associations people already have with Tigers Jaw. That album has been out 13 years, and I guarantee other people have experiences tied to that album that are just as powerful as mine; they’re just powerful in a different way. 

It makes me look on at music in wonder. It makes concerts astonishing. That we can all stand in the same room, sit in the same theater, or crowd together in the same basement and all experience something together at the same time, all forming a new association with those songs at the same time. It’s encoding something in us in real-time. It’s bonding us forever. 

Music is beautiful because it can bring us together in those moments, if only for an hour or so. Eventually, we’ll all look back on that time we saw Tigers Jaw live and how much fun we had that night. Or how bad it was. Or the weird drunk dude who kept shouting the lyrics at the top of his lungs and spilled beer on the person in front of him. Twice. Associations are infinite. There’s an endless number of feelings, and each person will remember them differently. What’s more, those feelings can never be wholly imparted upon another soul. We can get together physically or digitally and find solace in the same piece of music. We can also listen on our own, live our lives the best way we know, and grow those personal feelings over time. We can talk about music now or find each other years down the line. Music is both collaborative and solitary. It’s communal and custom. The best part is that it’s powerful no matter what. 

That’s why I encourage anyone and everyone to write about music. That’s why I purposely choose to focus this blog on the intersection between music and life. Because you can’t have one without the other, and there’s no “right” way to write about those associations or convey those feelings. It’s why every discography ranking, countdown, and year-end list is inherently flawed. A writer can say the music “rips,” “shreds,” or “slaps” all day long. You can analyze the choruses, examine the guitar solos, and explain the drum pattern, all with perfect terminology, but at the end of the day, that’s just describing the music. If you’re writing about an old album, and if it’s an album that’s truly dear to you, then try to capture the layer just beyond. Try to explain your feelings, your truth, your life that lies just beyond the music. Try to explain your musical associations and lay out your experiences. Attempt to capture that beautiful and unique essence that you bring to the music. That’s the art of music writing, that’s where the beauty lies. That’s the intersection between music and life.

This all makes the name of Tigers Jaw’s new album feel particularly apt; I Won't Care How You Remember Me. I haven’t heard the album yet, so I don’t know the context in which that sentiment is delivered, but it makes me think about my own history with the band. It makes me think about all of our separate histories with the band. Tigers Jaw don’t care if you love this album or hate it. They don’t care if you view it as better or worse than their self-titled. None of that matters to them. They don’t care how you remember them. All that matters is that you remember them.