This is an album that hits the same raw emotional territory as a Ruston Kelly or Lydia Loveless or Deaf Havana or Jetty Bones album and then keeps going, but with the scope to look outside itself and cut to the core of what could be a generational statement. Then I got another four or five listens in and I realized I had a larger problem: I couldn’t find the flaws on this project, because whenever I got close, Spanish Love Songs drives another semi-trailer into the gut. …folks, I made a statement on Twitter that I was planning to include this album in On The Pulse because it might just be the best way to get this all the exposure it deserves, especially when you realize that what it does so right might not demand a lot of words to describe. But hell, I could use a good emotional gutpunch, so what did we get on Brave Faces Everyone? And the writing… take the unflinching self-aware honesty of Max Bemis updated to the modern era and barrelling into the pits of depression, addiction, and a steadily expanding scope to look beyond himself, and you had an act on the rise in the best way possible… but I’ll admit after the excellent Schmaltz I wasn’t sure how much further the band would go, reportedly integrating more synth textures which can be very hit-and-miss in emo.
And this awareness was present among the best acts in and adjacent to the genre: Sorority Noise, The Wonder Years, PUP, you name them.Īnd into that scene we have to include Spanish Love Songs, a California-based act that I’d seen drifting on the edges of the conversations for those in the know with a solid mid-2010s debut, but really smashed into the scene proper in 2018 with Schmaltz, with broad improvements in more diverse song-structures, more expansive grooves, and their absolute powerhouse of a frontman in Dylan Slocum, who had the trembling but powerfully emotive roar of a bruiser - think Dan Cambell of The Wonder Years but deeper and a little more unstable. Emo of previous decades had angst but mostly grounded it internally amidst waves of poetry - in the 2010s there still was that angst, but there was less of a flowery wallow, and a blunter sense of realism that demanded a greater scope. And sure, some of it is linked to ‘rock is dead’ media narratives piared with how outside of Warp Tour punk and emo at their most raw never had easy radio crossover, but I’d argue there’s a subtextual element as well: simply put, specifically in the rise of midwestern emo there was a heaviness and maturity to the more thoughtful songwriting that didn’t just wallow in easy relationship drama, part of which came from established acts hitting middle age but for the newer generation there seems to be a greater societal awareness of both mental health and broader systemic decay. And yet with the newest wave coming out of the 2010s it hasn’t quite happened, not achieved the crossover even as trap and emo rap appropriate signifiers and even chord structures, and I’ve been fascinated as to why. During its expansion throughout the 90s, in comparison with more hard-edged political touchpoints that the larger music industry would dilute out of the genre, emo’s more introspective framing made its adaptation for the mainstream an easier sell, which is why in the pop rock explosion of the 2000s it was much more easily commodified and trivialized. I think it can get overlooked sometimes that emo comes from punk.Īnd before you protest, I mean more thematically in its focus than in the sound outright.
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