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Volume CXXXIII, Number 13 |
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Finding "emo": A Homesick for Space odyssey
KACY KARLEN
STAFF WRITER
I like to say that it all started for me about six months ago, when I was rifling through piles of used CDs in my favorite dusty, dingy music shop. I was contemplating buying another copy of The Cranberries' Everyone Else Is Doing It So Why Can't We? for safekeeping, when I noticed two bespectacled ectomorphs digging enthusiastically through bins, dropping terms like "postmodern," "indie" and "emo" in voices scarcely above whispers. I was intrigued.
Emo. Something about the word sounded so charmingly esoteric, so exotic. And I recall feeling the need to rush home and Google it, hoping that it had something to do with musical genre and not with a species derivation of the emu.
So began my acquaintance with "emotional punk" (in abbreviated form: emo). Although exact definitions of the genre are as ambiguous as the range of low-profile bands that epitomize it, emo typically fuses driving punk musicalities with impassioned lyrics; it's all about the artful blending of hard and soft.
The style was born out of hardcore 80s bands like Minor Threat and Rites of Spring, and over the last decade has tapered into softer stuff, heralded by mainstreamers like Weezer, Dashboard Confessional, and Jimmy Eat World.
For me and apparently quite a few other listeners, a big part of the emo appeal is the poetic, heartbreaking quality of so many of the lyrics. When a band can make me believe in the stark vulnerability behind the words, "you stood at your door with your hands on my waist / and you kissed me like you meant it," they're good. Pretty darn good. Add some requisite guitar riffs and pounding percussion, and I'm completely hooked.
In my latest attempt to be that quasi-cool music geek who revels in knowing about some semi-obscure groups, I picked up Unison by Homesick for Space. Besides professing an apparent love of galaxies and interplanetary activity, this up-and-coming quartet offers up some of the most compelling melodies I've heard in a while, drawing on electronic and jazz sensibilities as well as punk to create intense musical textures.
Homesick for Space is based out of Long Island and fronted by virtuosic musician Peter Bisso, along with Patrick DeRiso, Eric Talesnick, and Rich Berta. The band really blossoms on the album's title track, a brilliant mix of a recurring distorted guitar riff, steady drumming, and Bisso (sounding eerily like Thom Yorke), crooning "breathe with me / in unison here with me."
Other tracks of note are the delightfully introspective, melodious "Oh, How You Shine," beautified by Bisso's transition between a whispery falsetto and an angsty howl, and "The Echo of Your Eyes," which is marked by a killer combination of electric guitar, piano, and Eric Talesnick totally mastering a pulsating bass line. The seamless repetition of the words "the echoes of my eyes / in my searching heart through haunting lilac skies" on this track is pleasingly melancholic and gracefully lulling. Homesick for Space really gets at the essence and diction of lovelorn-ness while still pushing a foot-tapping beat.
For all you hopeless romantics, disenchanted intellectuals, and experimentalists out there, Unison is a great introduction to fostering an appreciation for a style that is by no means confined to rebellious preteens. Amazingly, trying out an album along these lines doesn't even require wearing black-rimmed glasses, shrunken sweaters, and/or a perpetually pouty expression. If anyone asks, just say that you're on the track to finding emo.
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