Just Got Back From The Discomfort - We're Alright (studio album) by The Brave Little Abacus

From ForegroundNoise 04/20/2020 18:32

Okay, I’m gonna stick my neck out here and go out on a limb for this record: Just Got Back… is the best emo album of all time. For what that’s worth. If you hear the word ‘emo’ and think chokers, comb-over fringes, and running mascara, then I know how that sentence must sound to you. But this crown isn’t won through teenage nostalgia; I may have entered the decade an angsty tween drowning in hormones, but by some minor miracle I managed to escape the grasp of pop punk’s black acrylic nails. I was less MCR, more Chris Martin - something at the time I was probably proud of but in retrospect wish it’d been the other way round. Trust me on this one, The Brave Little Abacus are a different beast entirely.

And this isn’t a dig at so-called ‘fake’ emo either. “Real emo”, as the viral copypasta goes, “sounds ENERGETIC, POWERFUL, and somewhat HATEFUL”; a three-word round hole this square peg of a band struggles to fit into. ‘Energetic’ - sure. ‘Powerful’ - maybe. But ‘hateful’?

After limited success, two LPs, and less than five years under their belt, in 2012 The Brave Little Abacus split for good. Some of the members would go on to perform sporadically in other groups, but the dream of ‘making it’ was over. There’s a naïve euphoria to the band which they can’t help spill out into their songs, and in hindsight it seems impossible to imagine them existing any longer than they did. It’s the fearlessness youth brings which allows them to throw everything at the wall, from jazz to drone to bossa nova, and by sheer force of will make it stick, in a way older musicians would be too cynical to try. In 2012 The Brave Little Abacus didn’t just break up; they grew up.

From Onater 07/26/2019 07:18

The most glorious, cathartic, transcendental, beautiful, perfect piece of pure unrefined angst ever put to recording. One of those albums where it's hard to believe it can even exist.