Austin – It was a minor tragedy when, sometime between ’05 and ’08, emo was scorned into early retirement. The label was nebulous in the first place, applied to any rock music with enough juvenile male pathos. On that basis the critics were mostly unfair—exceptions granted only for anyone who questioned the scene’s under-recognized privilege and the problems of glamorizing mental illness. More often the complaints smacked of boys-don’t-cry sexism, and a double standard about traits that have been tolerated in pop music since Dion and The Belmonts gave us “Teenager in Love.”
Maybe that reduced profile has been a factor in the success of You Blew It!, an Orlando four piece that came together in 2009, years too late to ride the wave. But left in peace, they’ve developed a sound as emo as ever—heartbroken, loud, and shifting tempo so rapidly that a rhythm-less mosh is about the best your average person can do, dancing-wise.
That was the audience that showed up for the band’s Austin set at Mohawk on last weekend: loud, energetic, tightly packed, but not too much to make room for a pit when a few of them decided it was called for. But it was also an audience with a sharp age gradient between the older fans who weathered emo’s decline, and a younger set—unsurprisingly, about high school aged—taking advantage of the all-ages admission.
It isn’t as if that sort of broad appeal is very difficult to achieve with emo—the genre’s strength is its ability to fulfill, in one song, the apparently conflicting appetites for catchy pop hooks and dark, manic imagery. You Blew It! stand out for their adept management of those multiple demands, especially on signature track “Match & Tinder,” a typical emo medley of driving punk chorus and hardcore breakdowns that sources directly from Texas Is the Reason. The song puts its strongest material up front with an opening hook that leans heavy on the pop, but that helps to sell you on the rest of it.
That sell becomes important in the context of a set. Emo’s application to barely related kinds of music has often been a criticism of its usage as a label, but You Blew It! seem to embrace the whole range—the older, more pure hardcore strain, and the radio-ready pop of Jimmy Eat World. A review of their set can easily devolve into an argument over which of those counts as “real” emo. And frankly, I would fall in the pop camp. But You Blew It! do a good job live of making room for both, using “Match & Tinder” to warm up for “The One With David,” a melodic hardcore track that carries its energy more through volume and dynamics than through beat. This probably isn’t a warmup that everyone needed but it has an impact beyond placating those of us less turned on to Sunny Day Real Estate. The two halves seem to draw on each other, to point out what the other’s doing well. The show blends together pleasingly, and often it’s only the lyrics and the punctuating stage banter that alerts you to the shift from one song to the next.
That label can’t stretch indefinitely, it turns out. The band refused to play a Weezer cover when asked, but apparently they’re semi-famous for their collection of Blue Album covers—or something like “Bedside Manor,” which might as well be a Death Cab For Cutie cover. The faint praise in that damning belongs to their choice of Death Cab to cover. You can certainly do worse than The Photo Album and Transatlanticism era Ben Gibbard for inspiration. It’s not even as though “Bedside Manor” is a bad song; only that it doesn’t seem to belong in their live show. It slows the pace, and I was having too much fun to tolerate the interruption.
If the alleged emo revival is for real, then You Blew It! may have made good starting at the genre’s nadir. They’ve gained a following on both sides of the scene’s generation gap, and with a few years and a strong catalog already to their name, they seem to be well positioned to grow with the scene. Their latest release, Pioneer of Nothing, is three songs of the aforementioned Gibbard-esque material, which are worth having on CD and worth using for a bathroom break during the live set. But my verdict is still overwhelmingly that you should see this show, which is touring the US nightly throughout February.
Go HERE for more on You Blew It!
Will Jukes
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