Endswell and Excuse Me, Who Are You? – Twins in Wisconsin Screamo

Thumbs Up Records

Something they don’t tell you about music writing is how often you wind up saying the same thing. I try not to use the same phrase multiple times within one article, but I’ve absolutely written the word “propulsive” more than any normal person should. As a writer, though, you have a box of tools, some of which you break out more often than others. 

I suppose a good writer would learn to recognize those tropes and avoid them, but me? I lean into them. Some descriptors are just objectively true, no matter how cliched they sound. Shoegaze music is dreamy. Pop-punk music is sunny. Who am I to pan through a thesaurus to find a synonym when common parlance is right there? Would I rather get my point across easily, or do I want to make my audience Google a word just so I can sound smart while still saying the same thing?

My point is I know my own writing style well enough to know what words I gravitate towards. Especially when you focus on a genre of music as specific as emo, there are only so many words you can use to talk about these sounds.

Despite its odd time signatures and youthful vigor, emo music is often very predictable. This is a genre that cribs from itself constantly. There’s a pantheon of great artists that most younger artists revere, and lots of the current music (both good and bad) stems directly from that inspiration and reinterpretation. Most of the time, you know where an emo song is going before it even gets there. You know the turmoil; you grow to expect the instrumentation. After long enough, you might even become immune to the zany pop culture clips that bands deploy to punctuate a particularly sick riff. If I’m being honest with myself, I have an insatiable appetite for this shit. And that’s why I’m here.

This predictability is also what makes it so exhilarating when a band does something unexpected within this format. 

I’ll admit, this was a lot of bullshit lead-up to say that “Heart Container,” the first official song from the screamo project Endswell, is a phenomenal piece of music. It’s a track that mixes emo and post-hardcore in pretty equal measure and also makes me want to bust out every word that I tend to reach for when talking about this genre. 

The track opens with an iconic Ocarina of Time soundbite as we hear our old, annoying friend Navi shout a phrase every 90s kid and Zelda fan knows all too well, “HEY! LISTEN!” Immediately after this Pavlovian call to attention, a snappy drum beat cracks through the song. Seconds later, a tappy guitar joins in with fractal, spiky sounds straight out of the math rock playbook. 

For a moment, I can hear ripples of all my favorite late-2000s post-hardcore bands. Endswell sound like a group whose demo I would find while cruising MySpace, then see signed to Sumerian or Equal Vision a couple of years down the line. 

When I think about seeing this song performed live, I imagine shouting along to the strained Stars Hollow-esque screams over the needly guitarwork and ear-shattering bass drops. In an alternate timeline, I could practically see myself listening to this song over my blown-out Honda Civic’s speakers slotted between Blessthefall and the demo for Skies of December. 

(Editors Note: if you understood that last reference, please message me immediately, I need someone to bond with over Skies of December)

Adjacent to the awesome progressive post-hardcore screamo of Endswell is a Midwest emo band called Excuse Me, Who Are You?. The two projects share members, resulting in a Venn diagram of sounds that overlaps a decent amount, but still retains some key distinctions that make each project unique. 

Both of these bands are based out of Madison, Wisconsin, a state that, between Bug Moment, Tiny Voices, Honey Creek, and Barely Civil, seems to be massively exciting right now. At the epicenter of this upper-Midwest emo pop-off is Thumbs Up Records, a small-run DIY label that’s been around since 2020 and touts itself as the “Home of the Riff Mafia.” 

Technically, Excuse Me, Who Are You, and Tiny Voices are the only bands on that above list actually signed to the label. With Endswell joining their ranks this February (and new music teased for later in the year), it seems like a good time to put all your DIY stocks in Thumbs Up Records. 

But back to the music of EMWAY, the other, slightly more emo side of the Endswell coin. The band only has four songs out right now (technically five if you count a standalone rendition of the EP’s closing track), but essentially, the band’s entire body of work exists in full on the 12-and-a-half minute About That Beer I Owed Ya. The Half-Life samples sprinkled throughout the EP might be easy to write off as arbitrary overly compressed soundbites, but to a gamer-ass dork like myself, when I first fired up the release and heard “Rise and shine, Mr. Freeman,” a jolt of decade-old nostalgia shot through my body like Frankenstein. 

The first song, “They’re Waiting For You Gordon,” even features guest vocals from Maxwell Culver of Endswell, pushing the two projects together to the point where they fuse into one. The band lets the tail end of the opening monologue from Half-Life 2 play out as the instrumental slowly brings things up to speed for a screamo rant over peppy guitar plucks that eventually snap into place and lash out in a coordinated attack with the other instruments. 

The middle two songs, “Chicken Cock” and “Urine Luck,” obviously don’t take themselves too seriously but tout equally impressive emo instrumentation, dramatic screams, and progressive hardcore breakdowns. At one point, I remember hearing the classic “Emo WOO!” and opening my Spotify app to grab a screenshot. I sat there for a moment staring at my screen as I took in the nostalgic Polaroid-like album art perched above the words “Urine Luck” and “Excuse Me, Who Are You?” I texted my partner a screenshot saying, “I think I found the most emo song/band/album art combination of all time.”

Emo is a genre rife with tropes and cliches. Its very name is a diminutive, dismissive short-hand almost meant to read “don’t take this seriously.” But I do take this seriously, and so does Excuse Me, Who Are You? The band uses video game samples and goofy song titles yet still displays real feelings and *clears throat* emotions throughout their four given tracks. The presentation may turn some away, but the music scratches a very real itch for me and arrives at a very earnest place. 

By the time the EP’s killer final track rolls around, I often find myself ready to revisit Endswell. This results in an endless feedback loop, where I remain (willingly) stranded in the same Wisconsin basement with these two bands. I just want to sit there, embedded in the crowd, sipping my beer and watching these musicians build off each other until the roads are clear enough for all of us to get home safely. We might be snowed in with these members of the Riff Mafia, but it’s nice. We have cold beer and sick tunes. Why would you wanna go anywhere else?

Flycatcher – Stunt | EP Review

MEMORY MUSIC

Flycatcher’s newest release, Stunt, shows an emo band that’s comfortable playing with fire (i.e., melodic pop-punk) while exploring sounds and emotions still distinctly theirs. Their explosive, sharp drums provide a canvas for the band to explore nostalgia, yearning, and real feelings without ever swerving into cheeseball territory. This is a pop-punk band for 2023.

With Stunt, Flycatcher summons the ghosts of a dozen early-2000s rock predecessors and holds court with them in a modern context. For a brief second in the chorus of “Always Selfish,” I caught a whiff of the Foo Fighters’ classic “Everlong” in frontman Greg Pease’s vocal down-turn over piecey guitars. But more often, his melodic singing makes me wistful for anthemic pop-punk acts like The Starting Line or even 2010s British indie like The Kooks. Regardless, there’s something roundly nostalgic about his singing that’s both welcome and well-executed. That’s not to say Flycatcher are stuck in the past: they experiment with a variety of guitar tones that feel mostly contemporary. 

The opening track, “Games,” introduces Stunt with choppy strums that open up by the time the choruses roll around. On “Rust,” the EP’s loudest song, prominent bass carves a path for the chorus’ grungy power chords. But on the final track, “Quitter,” the band’s lead guitar acquiesces to full-on nostalgia. They kick the song off with hazy, plucked guitar notes that feel like they’re straight from the early 2000s but remain grounded in pounding drums that feel like they’re straight from the present-day East Coast scene. 

Their introspective lyrics touch on self-reflection without overindulging. EP standout “Sodas in the Freezer” precedes the first chorus with the lyrics “So I’ll keep leaving sodas in the freezer / Hanging clothes out in the rain,” admitting the futility of self-pity. It’s not easy to address real emotions in a way that’s both sincere and salient, but on Stunt, Flycatcher—just like the best of their pop-punk predecessors—have accomplished it.

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Katie Wojciechowski is a music writer and karaoke superstar in Austin, Texas. She is from there, but between 2010 and now, also lived in Lubbock, TX, Portland, OR, and a camper. Her life is a movie in which her bearded dragon Pancake is the star. You can check out her Substack here and some of her other writing here. She’s writing a book about growing up alongside her favorite band, Paramore.

Mystic 100's – On a Micro Diet | Album Review

SELF-RELEASED

How do you know when an artist has rebranded or simply taken a step that is a natural evolution in their journey? It can be hard to tell. When Vampire Weekend put out Father of the Bride, they rebranded their image and, somewhat unsuccessfully, their sound. It was their first album to not feature founding member Rostam Batmanglij, and the group decided to shift from their Ivy League coolness to a looser, crunchier, and dare I say, vibier outlook that was expressed in both their sonic and visual presentations. Good on them for trying something different, but the results were underwhelming because their new direction seemed so calculated and forced.

This is not the case for Mystic 100’s, the Olympia, Washington band formerly known as Milk Music. While they have undergone a name change, the band’s new (or should I say debut?) album, On a Micro Diet, feels like a natural next step for the group. Both Milk Music and Mystic 100’s worship the guitar, but the ways they practice their devotion are different. Milk Music’s sound was hard-charging riffs and rapid solos in the vein of Dinosaur Jr, while Mystic 100’s take on a much more exploratory sound that is elongated, jammy, and improvised at times. To put it in the dumbest way I can think, Milk Music is the bouillon cube, condensed and pungent, and Mystic 100’s are the broth, expansive and warm.

On a Micro Diet is a long album, spanning seventy-five minutes over nine songs, but it never feels like it overstays its welcome. I’ve listened to the album on walks with my dog, while I was cleaning the kitchen, chilling in the hot tub, and even at the gym, never once feeling as though the durations of the songs were testing my willpower. In fact, it was the loose and almost unstructured feel of the music that kept pulling me back. When I wasn’t listening, I often found myself humming bits of melodies as I went about my daily tasks. These timestamps grounded me each time I returned for another listen, allowing me to find new details in the band’s wanderings.

Mystic 100’s do an excellent job of mixing things up, something that is not always guaranteed in this realm of music. “Message from Lonnie” is a mid-tempo expression of love that grooves like waves lapping against the beach at sunset and perfectly showcases Alex Coxen’s melodic soloing. The nearly twenty-minute centerpiece “Have You Ever Chased a Lightbeam?” is just begging to be played at this year’s Desert Daze festival. The song requires patience as it shifts back and forth from a “Cortez the Killer”-style seance limbo state of guitar feedback, but is rewarding if you are willing to trust the band. Amidst all of the sunburnt daydreaming, you can still see traces of their former selves in “Windowpane,” a straight-ahead strummer that acts as a moment of clarity before descending further into madness.

This is who Mystic 100’s was born to be. By shedding their Milk Music skin, they have given themselves the freedom to explore their interests fearlessly. If you are willing to let go of your inhibitions, you will find something to enjoy in On a Micro Diet. 

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Connor lives in Emeryville with his partner and their cat and dog, Toni and Hachi. Connor is a student at San Francisco State University and is working toward becoming a community college professor. When he isn’t listening to music or writing about killer riffs, Connor is obsessing over coffee and sandwiches.

The New Pornographers – Continue As A Guest | Album Review

It’s been 23 years since The New Pornographers’ breakout debut Mass Romantic in 2000. Since then, the band has earned their right to be called one of indie rock’s greatest supergroups… “Supergroup,” in this case, means a group of multiple knockout singer-songwriters who have years of output, either on their own or as a part of side projects, but still get together every few years to collaborate. Think of Sleater-Kinney (Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker) or Sonic Youth (Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, and Lee Ranaldo). The influential and iconic sounds of these bands would not have been possible without the creative input of each songwriter.

Spearheaded by A.C. Newman and Neko Case, The New Pornographers have achieved indie rock canon across all eight of their albums up to this point. Their most notable tenure was released on the legendary Matador Records before moving to Anti- in 2017. That year’s Whiteout Conditions was their first without founding member and the trifecta-completing Dan Bejar, who is most well known for leading the band Destroyer. Despite his absence, the band proved they could still release one of their best albums yet under a new permutation. That formula was shown to be inconsistent with the 2019 follow-up In The Morse Code Of Brakelights, their weakest crop of tunes all around. Apart from the outlier hit “Falling Down The Stairs Of Your Smile,” the album featured a general lack of energy and immediacy that was a hallmark of their previous albums.

Continue As A Guest is the band’s ninth LP and their debut for Merge Records. This label feels like a natural home for The New Pornographers; Merge has shared many artists with Matador over the years and boasts just as iconic of a back catalog. Newman and Case also dug into the archives and have worked in some unreleased Bejar material, which appears as the lead single and album opener “Really Really Light.” The track feels like a New Pornographers family reunion, containing fragments that date back to the Brill Bruisers days and very well could have sat comfortably in its tracklist. On the whole, Continue As A Guest is a notable improvement on its predecessor but still exists in a more low-key presentation, leaving behind the up-tempo power-pop that defined their most celebrated works.

In exchange, the band locks into some surprisingly groovy cuts, like “Pontius Pilate’s Home Movies,” where Newman and Case share vocals on one of the most unique lyrical subjects for a Pornos tune in a long while. “Now you’re clearing the room just like Pontius Pilate when he showed all his home movies. All of his friends yelling, ‘Pilate, too soon!’” It’s sort of the band’s exploration of oblivious ego like Ben Folds Five’s “Steven’s Last Night In Town” or Ted Leo’s “The Little Smug Supper Club.”

Just as danceable, the song “Angelcover” is a borderline disco biscuit. The New Pornographers are no strangers to electronic elements– they’ve been incorporating strong keyboard lines into their songs on every album –but this might be the danciest they’ve ever gotten. The band muses, “Melody ain’t got nothing on the delivery,” but luckily, on this track, they’ve got a large dosage of both. Additionally, the title track, “Continue As A Guest,” is backed with a tasteful horn section that blissfully sways into the album’s second half.

While A.C. Newman is the primary vocalist, Neko Case compliments him as she always does on his tunes, but she also continues the tradition of leading a few of her own. Case’s “Crash Years” from 2009’s Together is my all-time favorite song in the band’s discography. Unfortunately, this time around, Case’s contributions are the weakest moments across the tracklist. The batch starts with “Cat and Mouse With the Light,” an underwhelming ballad that may have been better suited for a solo album. Case, who generally is an extremely bright lyricist and vocalist, completely misses in both categories on “Marie and the Undersea” in the second half of the album. “Marie, as the undersea calls out your name. Next thing you know, you’re flicking your cigarette out the window.” This song doesn’t strongly evoke the character, who’s presented in the middle of a crop of mermaidian clichés. It feels like she’s oddly playing below her strengths, and these moments only slow down the pace of the album.

For longtime fans, there’s still a handful of moments like “Really Really Light” that unmistakably fall into the band’s classic sound. “Bottle Episodes” could have come right out of the Challengers album with its focus on acoustic-based chamber-pop, with every member of the band clearly audible in the group vocals and strong instrumental performance. Newman warns, “when you’re dancing with the Devil, you don’t get to pick the song they play.” The album’s closer, “Wish Automatic Suite,” employs the same compositional techniques, with a melancholic tone shift at the end that’s expertly transitioned into from the strong refrains before it.

Both “Last and Beautiful” and “Firework In The Falling Snow” are the second to last songs in their respective halves of the album, which coincidentally seem to be Continue As A Guest’s dead zones. The two most forgettable songs here with nothing standout to latch onto, but also nothing too troubling to criticize. This effect is truly the Achilles heel of …Brakelights, but thankfully only carries over in a small way across the runtime of Guest.

I don’t necessarily think The New Pornographers’ best days are behind them, especially since the highlights of this album, like “Pontius Pilate…” or the title track, are genuinely great songs. Newman and Case are songwriting veterans, and it would be foolish to assume their muses are totally fading. Continue As A Guest just happens to be a bit of a mixed bag. The moments where they’re stepping outside their musical comfort zone, to mostly pleasurable results, sound a little inconsistent paired with the more typical sounding tracks. The album advert describes it as “10 new, explosive, genre-defying earworms.” While I can’t dispute the descriptor that these songs are new, not everything is explosive, and in those less powerful moments, the earworms are not always to be found. At the very least, it makes it more interesting in some respects than their last effort. With Continue As A Guest, I’ll still continue as a fan.

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Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.

M83 – Fantasy | Album Review

The ‘Midnight City’ Band is, unfortunately, not a forgotten funk group from the ‘70s. This shorthand actually refers to the French electronic group M83, who formed almost 25 years ago. Their 2011 breakout album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming spawned the “indietronica” mega-smash “Midnight City,” which finds itself in playlists alongside other anthems of the same ilk. See “Walking On A Dream” by Empire Of The Sun or “Little Secrets” by Passion Pit.

M83 garnered much blogosphere praise in the years leading up to Hurry Up becoming a modest household sensation. Pitchfork awarded their coveted Best New Music distinction to their sophomore LP Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts in 2003, with a 9.2/10 rating. 2008’s Saturdays = Youth was revisited by Stereogum in its 10th anniversary year, calling it “lush, overwhelming synthpop… more complicated than the handful of new wave and dream-pop giants everyone compared it to.”

So, the band had their longtime celebrators, and by 2011 they had amassed tons of new listeners. The long-awaited Junk appeared five years later in 2016, which writer Ryan Leas calls in that same Stereogum piece “zonked-out.” Between the album cover and title, I’ll take his word for it. And aside from 2019’s DSVII – M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez’s second installment of video game-inspired ambient music – the band hasn’t released a proper album in seven years. Fantasy scratches the itch instantly.

M83 approaches the idea of “fantasy” from beautiful and strange vantage points, both in the music and the imagery. Gonzalez explained further on Twitter, “I want to keep having fantasies about worlds that I don’t know and creatures I don’t understand, and that’s the story behind this record.”  The album cover spotlights a strange alien figure and juxtaposes it with shiny neon lettering, giving an unsure first impression of exactly what type of fantasy the listener is about to be taken on. The serene introduction of “Water Deep” leading into the first single, “Ocean Niagara,” is a prog-rock adjacent couplet that suggests a more positive trajectory out of the gate. An odd choice for a first taste, as “Beyond adventure!” is the only lyric sung across its four-and-a-half minutes of steady electronic bliss. If patient fans weren’t satiated by that first track, maybe they were when M83 released the entire first “chapter” of the album, six songs altogether, to stream on February 9th.

Fantasy has quite a few moments of songs blending into each other, enhancing the seamless feeling of a fantastical trip throughout the listening experience. Tracks three and four, “Amnesia” and “Us And The Rest,” are M83 doing what they do best, an emotive mix of dream pop and dance music, making an instantly comfortable listen. “Amnesia” is sung from a fantasy skeptic’s perspective. “I believe in the darkness, it’s just a sound. I’m in love with some sadness, it’s just a sound.” Later, on “Earth To Sea,” Gonzalez takes a more Seussian lyrical approach: “Where will you go? Just say it, you can let go.”

Chapter Two opens with “Deceiver,” a groovy, sparkly disco-tinged number that sounds like it could have been a b-side to the Daft Punk & Panda Bear collab “Doin’ It Right” from Random Access Memories. While I dig this song, I believe it serves better as an ending to the first chapter as opposed to the start of a new one. Especially with Fantasy’s title track up next, serving as a statement of intent just as “Oceans Niagara” did at the start. Tracklist placement aside, this song is an absolute dancefloor smoker. “Shout it! Fantasy! Into a fantasy, into a wasteland, living in a fantasy,” Gonzalez refrains throughout. It’s an outstanding centerpiece of the album’s core themes.

“Laura” is a very pretty ballad that has one of the many mentions of traveling with another soul in this fantasy universe. “Take us on a ride, I’ll take you on a voyage through the night sky.” In the previous “Deceiver,” this character is a “distance driver;” similarly, “Amnesia” pleads to “Ride with me, slipping through my virtual magnet.” Throughout the album, Gonzalez channels classics like Elton John’s “Rocketman” or David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” through a more millennial lens. It’s lonely out in space, but he finds his companions within the great wide open. One of these companions is “Sunny Boy,” the crown jewel of the album. It’s the punchiest dance number with the strongest and most overt spatial fantasy lyrics. With an almost ABBA-like phrasing, Gonzalez swoons, “Cosmic adrenaline, she’s young and fierce. / Such a radiant queen.” Its reprise towards the album’s end is a welcome callback after the eight-minute, blissed- and blipped-out, almost-all French “Kool Nuit.”

This all leads up to the Fantasy finale, “Dismemberment Bureau,” suggesting the fantasy we might all be living in is one of televised overload. Gonzalez repurposes the legendary Gil-Scott Heron mantra, “Do you miss the day of human revolution? What a good way to learn from the hand of a legend. An illusion on color television.” Musically, I love the synth tones being laid down and think the track’s pacing is a strong compositional wrap-up. But it’s a bit of a ham-fisted topical ending, being the only moment on the album where fantasy and reality interweave. Maybe unexpectedly facing reality was M83’s intention after an hour of electronic sonic escapism.

I love any record that takes you on an otherworldly journey that presents you with things you don’t get in typical radio or supermarket music. On the whole, Fantasy delivers that journey, with the exception of a few curious elements regarding how it’s segmented. However much of the seven-year gap M83 took to put this together, it was clearly worth the wait. Maybe fantasy, reality, and the cosmos are all one and the same. If they are, a band named after a galaxy 15 million light years away certainly has the authority to say so.

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Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.