Run Quick EMO ALBUMS; Here I’ll POLL, You VOTED

honestly it's been almost a month and I don't know if my CDs are ever getting here so this seems as good a time as any

memorial thread of love and mystery for Juno, the Seattle rock band

SO I listened to 2 Jimmy Eat World and 2 Brand New albums and i thought they were ok.

Biggest discoveries for me were Thursday and Brand New.

There's some good OOP albums on this bandcamp from screamo/post-hardcore groups so maybe they should put out the Juno and Gospel albums?

https://thearchivistlabel.bandcamp.com/

The forcefedglass album on there is fantastic if you like screamo.

omg the Quicksand/Rival Schools axis of melodic Catherine Wheel-y post-hardcore is my JAM

I used to go to a shitty club indie/rock in Guildford and 'Head to Wall' takes me right back to those heady days.

Who gave the other votes to Okara and i hate sex?

Love that someone voted for both Engine Kid records since I missed the deadline. Props to your ballot Odysseus

I liked the I Hate Sex album. I prolly should've voted for it over a few of my picks.

I voted for Avril Lavigne.

1. The Get Up Kids - Something to Write Home About
2. The Anniversary - Designing a Nervous Breakdown
3. Hum – Downward is Heavenward
4. Shudder To Think - Pony Express Record
5. At The Drive-In - Relationship of Command
6. Avril Lavigne - Let Go
7. Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American
8. Rival Schools - United by Fate
9. The Dismemberment Plan - Change
10. The Promise Ring - Very Emergency
11. The Used - The Used
12. Hum – You’d Prefer an Astronaut
13. Jawbox - For Your Own Special Sweetheart
14. Quicksand - Manic Compression
15. Ozma - Rock and Roll Part Three
16. Seaweed - Four
17. Quicksand - Slip
18. Sunny Day Real Estate - How It Feels to Be Something On
19. Jimmy Eat World - Clarity
20. Against Me! - New Wave
21. The Promise Ring - Nothing Feels Good
22. Panic at the Disco - Pretty. Odd
23. Sunny Day Real Estate - Diary
24. Drive Like Jehu - Yank Crime
25. Pedro the Lion – Control
26. Unwound - Leaves Turn Inside You
27. Constantines - Tournament Of Hearts
28. The Good Life - Album Of The Year
29. The Get Up Kids - On a Wire
30. Hop Along - Get Disowned

in retrospect it's weird that Get Disowned got nommed but not Painted Shut.

true but either way i don't find hop along to be emo at all

Straight in at 101-125 // Emo Poll Near Misses

Regarding the emo/non-emo distinction: maybe this is too obvious to be right, but I've always thought that one of the main things that distinguishes emo from adjacent punk-derived styles was its focus, especially lyrically but also musically, on vulnerable emotions like sadness and desperation.

That would explain why a band with a sterling emo pedigree like Fugazi (half of Rites of Spring and the lead singer of Embrace!) isn't really emo (lots of oblique, outward-looking songs about politics and stuff), while a band with virtually no subcultural connection to emo like Weezer can place an album in the top ten of this poll.

So, without judgment, I've been trying to work out/articulate something about how I think the understanding of the term/concept "emo" has evolved and why there’s so much disagreement on what it means, even if we just look at it in terms of thematic/lyrical content. My sense is that post-00, people are using it to mean something like “earnest, unreflexive expression of the raw emotions of sadness or romantic heartbreak”? And I think this might be fundamentally different from what it meant in the context of ≈85-96 post-hardcore. Even with uncontroversially canonical emo artists like Rites of Spring or Moss Icon, I can’t really imagine them writing lyrics like these (quoted upthread as quintessentially emo lyrics):

And I haven't been taking my meds
So lock all the cabinets, and send me to bed
Cause I know you're still worried
I'm gonna get scared again
And make my insides clean with your kitchen bleach
But I've kissed enough bathroom sinks
to make up for the lovers that never loved me

My sense is that “emo” just meant they were dealing with personal introspection as opposed to singing about smashing the state but i) the emotions in question were not limited to, or even necessarily focused on, romantic heartbreak and ii) the way these emotions were addressed was either with introspective, even obsessive, reflection and self-doubt or with somewhat oblique and abstract poetic lyrics (cf Moss Icon), both of which are different from raw heart-on-sleeve purging. I think this is true even of the sappiest stuff like Rites of Spring’s “For Want Of” or Still Life’s “Outside Looking In”, let alone something like Moss Icon’s “Guatemala”. I think that people weren’t trying to write “Straight Edge” but they also weren’t trying to write “Pictures of You”.

Sort of a half-baked off-the-cuff hypothesis. A lot of you guys clearly know this stuff better than I do.

You so want to teach this subject to your students, don't you?

Oh, I'd be doing a better job of this if I were going to teach it.

And hope is just another rope
To hang myself with

the emotions in question were not limited to, or even necessarily focused on, romantic heartbreak

this isn't even true of '00s emo

Yeah, no, you're probably right: I don't even think MCR/FOB/PATD really fit that.

So, then, why doesn't Fugazi qualify? I don't think "Promises" or "Runaway Return" or "By You" are worlds away from a lot of the stuff you're talking about.

good question! i mean, i sorta think they do, they're the ultimate post-hardcore band

and it's not like post-hardcore ever totally unties itself from emo (except maybe with jehu)

idk it's fuzzy. it's a fuzzily-built genre

Hopefully I'm linking this correctly. Prior to this feature, the "Why Did Ever We Meet" video was the only thing I knew about emo. Plus, I had just discovered Napster. So this article/list was my initial understanding of what defined emo. And yes, the definition changed a lot over the next few years.

https://books.google.com/books?id=yjh_OmCmm-0C&lpg=PP1&dq=spin%201999&pg=PA148#v=onepage&q&f=true

So this article/list was my initial understanding of what defined emo

This basically summarizes mine: http://www.fourfa.com/styles/index.htm

Yeah I remember reading this too about a year later.

thanks for running the poll, i have a lot of listening to do!

glad Relationship of Command finished so highly (it would've been my #1 if i had voted). this album was probably the most important album in my musical development, representing a fork in the road where my more or less straightforward emo/screamo taste took a left turn to the experimental realm. while the beeps and boops on the album sound kinda quaint now, they were very radical and eye opening to my ears which hadn't really considered those sounds in the realm of possibility for music. omar's chord choices and phrasings were a revelation, and i still haven't heard anyone who sounds quite like him. cedric was an incredible front man with an incredible stage presence and whose lyrics introduced me to abstract and impressionistic styles.

as silly as it might sound, they also got me to start questioning traditional gender roles as they had manifest themselves in the punk/emo/screamo scene at the time. i recall him being mocked at the time for it, but cedric calling out slam dancers and refusing to play until the crowd danced respectfully really made an impact on me. also, learning that they wore women's jeans because they fit better caused me and some of my friends to also get a pair, predating the skinny jeans wave by a couple of years.

i was supposed to see them live for the first time at the end of april of 2001 but they broke up at the beginning of that month. i followed the mars volta intensely throughout their demo period and picked up the tremulant ep the day it came out (also the same day the first sparta ep came out). deloused in the comatorium was another very important album in my life, this time for intensely personal reasons not dissimilar to the theme of that album. i kept up with the mars volta over the years, but they never really hit the heights of RoC or DITC and my tastes drifted elsewhere. and now i'm done with my emo rant

Many thanks to the poll runners, personally most grateful for the discovery of the Anniversary and Appleseed Cast, I threw them two votes at the end of my ballot, which is otherwise the stuff on the noms list that I have a history with:

Johnny Foreigner - Waited Up 'til It was Light
Death Cab for Cutie - We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes
Fall Out Boy - Take This to Your Grave
Hotelier - Home, Like Noplace There Is
Johnny Foreigner - Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything
Dismemberment Plan - Emergency & I
Fall Out Boy - From Under the Cork Tree
blink-182 - Enema of the State
Brand New - The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me
Motion City Soundtrack - Commit This to Memory
Death Cab for Cutie - Something About Airplanes
The Promise Ring - Nothing Feels Good
American Football - American Football
Paramore - Paramore
Brand New - Deja Entendu
Sunny Day Real Estate - How It Feels to Be Something On
Fugazi - Repeater
Sunny Day Real Estate - Diary
The Anniversary - Designing a Nervous Breakdown
The Appleseed Cast - Mare Vitalis
Jawbox - For Your Own Special Sweetheart

just as an observation, the mall emo vs real emo vs whatever reminds me of glam vs metal and seems ultimately kinda boil down to some kind of underlying fear of dudes who wear too much makeup or have too many female fans idk

Was gonna bump the Los Camp! thread for this, but there's no search, and it seems relevant here because they explicitly (and proudly) label it emo

https://noisey.vice.com/en_ca/article/los-campesinos-rank-their-first-five-records

My computer died and I couldn't figure out how to log in on my phone until now. My ballot went out with the PC, but The Moon Is Down was my #1 and I'm a little surprised it didn't place at all. Also, Sund4r, I voted for Okara in the low 20s, I'm sure you're not surprised.

Also, in re: the goth side of emo. Anyone else like Antioch Arrow? I thought they were supposed to be kinda gothy/flashy.

Hold on, is there gonna be a tracks poll?

Great poll! like everyone else, lots of great discoveries/rediscoveries. Low Level Owl has become my favourite find I think. I voted Devil & God #1, glad to see it so high.

Like that site you posted Sund4r, i always viewed emo like > hardcore comes around, some bands take ~emotion~ (sadness, rage, etc) to the max > Others come along and write poppier versions of it (which some is classified as Indie & some as Pop just depending on the usual rules of the pop/indie dichotomy) > then we end up with Emo-Any Genre from bands that interpolate some shit from the classic post-hardcore emotive base. So I think a big part of it is self (or fan) definition. Anyone can write a song about emotion, but to be emo you have to write ~emotional songs~, so Fugazi just kinda decided to not be Emo, the fans went for it and that was that.

That seems like a cop-out explanation now that it re-read it, oh well \_(")_/

Also, really liked Hotelier, don't know much about 4th wave stuff, but if its more like them i need to check it out

Didn't CMJ or someone try to retcon Springsteen's Nebraska as emo? That's why it's such a nebulous and contentious genre, once people started using it as a descriptor it could rightly be applied to nearly anything.

(I know, describing music, the horror)

bumping this thread to share that my high school girlfriend who is now a mother of four just posted a photo of her and Jim Adkins on facebook today

/emo

the 2nd Juno cd arrived yesterday. Just waiting on the first one to come

After a couple more listens, The Rising Tide has really clicked with me, the run from Rain Song to The Ocean is great. Tearing Out My Heart is amazing. SDRE ranking as of today: How It Feels > Rising Tide > Diary > LP2

holy shit why did I write off LC! before hearing Romance Is Boring?

You were angry that the singer trolled football fans?

nah he seems pretty sound tbh

lol awesome, welcome to the fold! should have suggested it when you were asking what emo sounds like Crying, would have bumped it higher.

u inspired me to play romance is boring again. it has really been growing on me and the show was (maybe unsurprisingly) full of so much life + vigor compared to the album that it really made me appreciate them a lot more.

We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed is probably their most emo album tbh. Relistened to it today and was floored by it all over again, but I also notice how much it plays like those first two Taking Back Sunday records. Same explosive, pun-based bitterness

Guys... want to join me in the

Papa was a POLLING STONE: It's the 1970s SOUL/FUNK/DISCO ~~~ TRACKS POLL

lol after my listening habits were affected over the last two weeks due to this poll, my spotify "discover weekly" playlist this week is 29 indie rock songs and a run the jewels track

Heh, you should see the YouTube sidebar on my wife's laptop. Nothing but emo FULL ALBUMs.

I can't stop listening to False Cathedrals. It gets better with each listen.

Lol yeah my YouTube suggested videos is all emo all the time now.

Probably listened to that Saetia album 4-5 times in the past week or so.

Shortly after the poll results came in, I felt strangely compelled to try to get in touch with Arlie from Juno to let him know how well the records did. He got back to me a few weeks ago.

Hi Simon, thank you! That is very surprising and kind. Apologies for delay, infrequently check FB. Xo, Arlie