Rolling Stone's top 40 emo albums (35-31)

Part 2 of my deep dive into classic emo

Part two of my deep dive into classic emo takes into a big block of second wave and revival twinkle-daddy records. Not before we hit a giant pile of steaming shit, though.

35: Coheed and Cambria - Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV Volume 1: From Fear Through The Eyes of Madness. (2005, Columbia)

I know emo has a penchant for masturbatory self indulgence, but holy shit. I expected just from reading the word salad comprising this album’s title and looking at the runtime that I wasn’t gonna like it. Boy were my suspicions confirmed. The most offensive thing about this to me is there’s nothing challenging here except endurance. It’s 71 minutes of the most milquetoast mid-2000’s math rock imaginable. Think Relationship of Command era At the Drive-In with even more access to cocaine (I guess that means the Mars Volta, another band I have never heard before). The gall to end this record with the lyrics “you’re a selfish little whore, you’re a selfish little whore/if I had my way I’d crush your face in the door” is appalling. Imagine those words being the climax of your musical thesis and thinking the world needs over an hour of your limp-dicked rambling. Glassjaw at least had riffs. The only nice thing I have to say about this is sometimes it sounds like Rush, which is kinda cool.

34: Owls - Owls (2001, Jade Tree)

This band is entirely new to me. I feel ashamed ceding my emo cred to Rolling Stone, especially because I quite enjoyed this listen. It walks a tightrope I appreciate about emo done well, where it’s dense and impenetrable but simultaneously tuneful and pretty. Not much of this record is in 4/4 time, but there’s lots of hummable moments. I also enjoyed hearing some overlap with the the concurrent DC sound of the early 2000’s in this album’s more “bleep bloop” moments, along with (of course) the Midwest sensibility members of Owls helped pioneer in their earlier band, Capn Jazz. This was probably quite progressive when it came out, being barely concerned with the poorly recorded thrashings of DIY basement punk and more attuned to the sensibilities of mathcore and college rock. Emo for 2001’s modern man.

33: The Jazz June - The Medicine (2000, Initial)

If Owls are the early 2000’s shape of emo to come, Jazz June are an ode where the genre originated. They recorded The Medicine at Inner Ear studio, where much of the foundational 80’s DC melodic hardcore was tracked. The production is fuzzy, with trebly guitars and half-shouted vocals buried in the mix. That was a conscious choice — at this point emo bands were no longer playing exclusively in basements through half-broken PA systems. Jazz June were reaching back through eras with a type of historical lens you can’t get by listening to 40 Rolling Stone approved albums on Spotify. This is the sound of hoarding obscure seven inches from bands you saw in sweaty VFW halls. I really appreciate that about this record. Some of the songs are riff-salady, and a few of them are way too long, but when this record goes, it goes hard. This is top tier skateboard video soundtrack music. Some of these songs were actually featured on the snowboarding game Amped.

32: Algernon Cadwallader - Some Kind of Cadwallader (2008, Be Happy)

I’ve heard people say the demo is actually this band’s best material, so I listened to both it and the LP. I think the demo songs have a better sense of dynamic trade off between the quiet and loud parts. The LP is chaotic in a disorganized way, and lots of the tracks don’t really feel like they develop into anything. I don’t know if Rolling Stone would consider putting a demo on this type of list, but Algernon is a band you have to mention when talking about emo. They are to fourth wave what Death was to death metal — the band who beat everyone else to the punch by a year, operating at a genre-defining level while even their most avant-garde peers were still fucking around in the practice space. Nobody outside of the biggest dyed-in-the-wool nerds were making or listening to twinkly emo in 2008. Algernon pulled their scene out of the literal basement and helped turn it into one of the defining DIY music movements of 21st century.

31: The Jealous Sound - Kill Them With Kindness (2003, Better Looking)

I think this would be a good gateway for people who enjoy third wave stuff like Panic! and Fall Out Boy to get deeper into emo’s back-catalog. The song structures on here are pretty conventional, there are lots of soaring hooks, and it’s soft enough tone-wise to where it won’t scare anyone away. I honestly thought it was gonna be too saccharine for me when I first turned it on, but I caught myself bobbing my head on more than one occasion. There are definite underpinnings of the driving post-hardcore you would expect from ex-Knapsack members. Overall though, this record comes across sad and delicate. True emo shit.