Song Highlight: Chat Pile - Dallas Beltway

Disclaimer: This post describes a song dealing with violence toward children.

In my years listening to music, I have heard many songs detailing violent or disturbing subject matter. The list of metal bands singing about atrocities is almost endless, though not many of those songs actually feel unsettling. A lot of this is due to the fact that their exploration of violent subject matter is usually just for shock value and has no air of believability. The song “Dallas Beltway” by Chat Pile is one of the first songs in awhile that unnerved me. 

Song Highlight: The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die - Getting Sodas

Over the past few years, I have found that YouTube has very effective algorithms for helping me find exciting “Midwestern Emo” bands. Midwestern Emo is a subgenre of Emo music that takes more cues from indie rock than the hardcore punk that influenced most early Emo bands. While still being guitar-driven, the guitars are cleaner and less aggressive than those from hardcore punk. The vocals are often whiny and not what would conventionally be considered “good,” though that is made up for by the singers’ earnesty. Despite the genre name, not all the bands are from the American Midwest, with notable early practitioners like Sunny Day Real Estate being from Seattle. As with most niche musical genre tags, you can find scores of Reddit posts with people arguing over what band belongs in what genre. My description would almost certainly be ridiculed by “true” emo fans.

Song Highlight: Junior Kimbrough - Done Got Old

For much of my life, I never connected with the blues. To me, most of the genre sounded same-ish, repeating similar lyrical content ad infinitum. This is a little surprising, given my love of sad and despondent music, and my allegiance to guitar-driven rock music, which arose from the blues. This mindset began to change when a good friend of mine introduced me to the music of Junior Kimbrough, originally by way of an excellent EP of covers by the Black Keys.

Song Highlight: Thou, Emma Ruth Rundle - Out of Existence

The Baton Rouge sludge metal stalwarts Thou have been hard to pin down stylistically since their inception in 2005. While you could just slot them into the Doom / Sludge metal genre and call it a day, that would be underscoring their creativity. It is not uncommon for their tracks to intersperse crushingly powerful riffs with gorgeous post-rock ambient passages. If asked to think of a band that is able to be beautiful and ugly within the confines of a single song, Thou is the first that comes to my mind. Through a dizzying collection of releases, they have explored many different sounds. In 2018 alone, they released an ambient noise/drone EP, a grunge rock EP, a decidedly not metal alternative rock/acoustic EP, a full length record, and a split with the black metal/doom metal band Ragana.

Song Highlight: Rilo Kiley - The Good That Won't Come Out

A friend of mine prompted me to revisit Rilo Kiley’s music via a fantastic article on Pitchfork Media in anticipation for Jenny Lewis’ 2019 album On the Line. Lewis started her career as a child actress in the 1980s, but she grew tired of telling other people’s stories and started Rilo Kiley in 1998 with another child actor, Blake Sennett. The band became known for Lewis’ insightful and clever lyrics overtop fun and bright pop music, often a little at odds with the despondent lyrical content. 

Song Highlight: Julien Baker - Shadowboxing

If you have paid even passing attention to independent music in the past few years, you have undoubtedly heard about Julien Baker. The singer-songwriter burst onto everyone’s radar when her debut album Sprained Ankle was re-issued in 2015. The album was recorded while she was still a student at Middle Tennessee State University at just 19 years old. The album is a very personal examination of depression, substance abuse, and questions of faith, all set to sparse acoustic guitar. Before the success of her solo career, Baker toured and performed in the punk rock band The Star Killers (later renamed Forrister). While sonically that music is very different from her solo work, there is a groundwork of earnestness that runs through all of her music.

Song Highlight: Hüsker Dü - Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill

Hüsker Dü was was born out of the hardcore punk scene in the early 1980s but by the time they disbanded in 1988, they had made a lasting impact on more than just punk rock; they helped to usher in the era of Alternative rock of the 90s (Black Francis of the Pixies famously put out an ad searching for a bassist, looking for someone who was a fan of Peter, Paul, and Mary and Hüsker Dü). Unlike their contemporaries in the hardcore punk community, they did not eschew the music of the past (listen to their superb cover of the Byrds’ Eight Miles High). They began to embrace melody more and more, moving beyond the confines of the blisteringly fast, amphetamine-fueled hardcore punk of Landspeed Record. By their 3rd studio album, New Day Rising, the band had finally fully embraced the notion of writing melodic pop songs, though they were still delivered with a punk rock intensity with noisy, buzzing guitars and the vocals buried under it all.