Every other week, Ryan🇺🇸and Dan🇬🇧give each other an album to listen to and then talk about it. Most of these albums will probably be some form of emo (at least to start). Yes, we are aware this would probably work better as a podcast.
Ryan: We made it to a second issue! Excited to find out if this our... Sophomore Slump Or Comeback Of The Year.
Dan: Did we start?
Ryan: Yeah we’re in character now.
Dan: Oh okay. Hi Ryan! Who would have thought we could keep this charade going for two whole weeks. Is it a charade, or a farce?
Ryan: I love that Panic At The Disco song. I’ve been dying to ask you. What made you suggest Teenage Wrist? Also how did you come across them?
Dan: Well this is my "saw them in the basement of an Elk's Club on Long Island" moment. Because I saw them in a shed at the back of a pub called The Parish in Huddersfield in 2018. And then we all got drunk after. Really good live, really nice chaps.
Ryan: Damn ok that’s awesome actually. How loud were they? I feel like they were insanely loud.
Dan: Yeah, this was Huddersfield, you're either drinking with my brother and I, or you're going to the shitty nightclub. It was loud but like, good loud. Not like ‘I'm too old for this’ loud. The drummer, Ant, can really hit hard. So they have to play loud to be heard over him.
Ryan: For our American readers, Huddersfield is basically like the British equivalent of a mid-sized town in New Hampshire.
Dan: Huddersfield is what happens if you put an industrial town in Pennsylvania in the middle of the New Hampshire countryside.
Ryan: What an ugly thing you just said. Teenage Wrist exists inside a very strange Venn diagram of like the Foo Fighters and Jesus And Mary Chain and Cloud Nothings.
Dan: Yeah I can hear that. Speaking of industrial Pennsylvanian towns, I LOVE Hop Along. I had heard and enjoyed “Tibetan Pop Stars” prior to you sending me Get Disowned, it was in pretty regular rotation on my Spotify, but I had not heard the album. It's kinda just better than everything else, lyrically, vocally, musically. It's a best-of-the-decade level album.
Ryan: So I debated which album to send you. Because they have made three very different but equally perfect albums.
Dan: What made you choose Get Disowned?
Ryan: Knowing what I know about you, I thought you’d be really excited about the almost constant mood shifting and bizarre grooves they dig into. Every song has this really bold layering to it. It’s like a very groovy panic attack.
Dan: 1) I was excited about that. There are choral sing alongs! There are emo stop-starts! There are moody breakdowns! 2) I was most excited about the lyrics. Frances Quinlan is a genius. The other thing is it's very listenable. Like I had it on repeat start-to-finish for hours. There's no bar for entry. "Oh you like music? Get on in here, champ!"
Ryan: I saw them live in a bowing alley once and they were the scrappiest weirdest thing I’d ever heard. They played on junk instruments and Frances live was hitting like this Courtney Love/Stevie Nicks thing. It was wild.
Dan: Goddamn it. You beat my shed story. Were you pleased with Teenage Wrist overall? I sent it because it felt very much unexpected.
Ryan: I liked it! It was actually a huge surprise. I think I find them fascinating because they seem to be a fairly new band but they’e doing this retro sound that isn’t that retro. Plus they have riffs!
Dan: There's a production on the album that you don't get live, it's still a polished act, but much more raw, much louder.
Ryan: tbh that was my main criticism. Which was like it sounds as though their producer did not understand what they were trying to do.
Dan: I will take you with me next time I go see them in a shed in Huddersfield.
Ryan’s album for Dan:
Get Disowned by Hop Along
TL;DR: Jenny Lewis' emo younger sister
Tell me more: Get Disowned is Hop Along's second album, although their first as a full band. Singer/songwriter Frances Quinlan originally performed as a solo acoustic act before adding brother Mark Quinlan on drums and bassist Tyler Long, and you can still hear those roots in the her folk-style storytelling – the lyrics on Get Disowned often sound like they were cribbed from her teenage diary.
Hop Along is all about Frances Quinlan's voice, both her voice proper – the band's strongest instrument, and one of rock's best – and her voice in the literature sense of the word. Her writing is as funny as it is profound, setting you up with a witty observation and knocking you down with an "oh fuck" truth bomb.
In these songs are the characters and scenes that shaped her, refracted through her adult experiences, culminating in an album that listens like a really great short story collection reads. It's a meditation on love, loss, and death, full of imagery so hyper-specific and vivid you might be listening to an audiobook, only louder and with more heart-piercing falsetto.
Not to take anything from the music, which is just as rich as the lyrics – daring, experimental, and immensely pleasurable, swerving effortlessly from drone to folk to screeching guitars to pop. This is a sad album, but it's sad in the way The Cure is sad – bombastic and upbeat and defiant. It's about mourning the loss of your youth while you're still young enough to remember just how much everything hurt the first time. It might just be the best album you've never heard and the best novel you'll never read rolled into one.
Favourite Song(s): Laments ("A song for the sad ones who say they'll marry they guess.") Young and Happy! ("To be a child again and easily forgiven")
Emoji review: 😂😭💔📖💀/5
Dan’s album for Ryan:
Chrome Neon Jesus by Teenage Wrist
TL;DR: Millennial Foo Fighters
Tell Me More: There’s something bold, in a way, for an American band to release an album in 2018 that is simply a rock album — and not like the dad rock Budweiser commercial songs The Black Keys are making. Teenage Wrist is just really tight angular guitar music.
Up until last year, the band was largely driven creatively by Kamtin Mohager, the guy behind The Chain Gang of 1974. Which is surprising to me. Mohager’s music for Chain Gang has a little more life to it than Teenage Wrist. Although both projects are much more fascinated with instrumentals that can force your body to move than they are tight songwriting. Which isn’t a bad thing.
On Chrome Neon Jesus everything besides the riffs takes a back seat. And because of that, the album shines in its intros, outros, and interludes. But it’s also extremely self-conscious in a way that I find equal parts fascinating and frustrating. I kept imaging an album that embraces its raw edges a bit more. It feels like the band’s guitar players, Marshall Gallagher and Chase Barham, are being kept on a lease by the really polished production. There’s a throttled feeling throughout. I want to hear their full wall of sound.
There are moments though where everything really clicks into place — the breakdown riff in “Dweeb,” the intro of “Swallow,” the very end of “Spit” where the feedback starts to go nuts, the mid-section of “Black Flamingo,” the album’s closer “Waitress”.
At the same time, there’s also an argument to made that that self-conscious tension is at the core of what the band is. The album’s soaring highs and swampy and lethargic bottomed-out lows are flattened by compression and effects pedals and the result is something that sounds very liminal and seems genuinely interested in that in-between space. The album closes with the line “Go home to the teenage you, tell you not to worry / Stumble through the careless evenings where you dream of who you'll be,” which is incredibly fitting. It’s album not about letting loose, but the desire — and the fear — to do so.
Favorite Songs: “Swallow,” “Spit,” and “Waitress” all really nail that “scoring the winning touchdown in a early-2000s teen movie” vibe.
Emoji rating: 🤭🤘🏻🏈🎸 out of 5
Ryan: Ok song time. What’s your pick? I’m gonna bar you from adding “Tibetan Pop Stars”. It’s too easy lol. [editor’s note: this was written before the song was included in Vulture’s excellent emo list.]
Dan: Okay I'm torn, because the songs on Get Disowned are all unique and all great. It's between “Laments,” a seven-minute song from the POV of a mattress witnessing the break-up of a couple, and “Young and Happy!,” a break up song that is both the saddest and happiest song on the album.
Ryan: So I will say lol “Laments” changed my life.
Dan: Haha how so?
Ryan: Get a few drinks in me and I will give you a whole sob-filled PowerPoint hahaha let’s just say I heard it at a time in my life where it hit extremely hard in all the right ways. Weirdly enough I heard it for the first time while I was in traffic on the way to an internship in Brooklyn, eating cereal. I used to eat cereal in traffic. Like with milk and stuff.
Dan: Okay I'm gonna go with “Young and Happy!” because “Laments” is your song.
Ryan: Good. I can listen to our playlist and not have an existential crisis. For now.
Dan: Yes I don't want to break you again like the time I played “Konstantine” the night you left London.
Ryan: 🙃
Dan: What song are you choosing?
Ryan: “Waitress” is in my opinion the song where everything about Teenage Wrist clicks into place.
Dan: Yeah it pops.
Ryan: They are extremely good at outros but this one in particular rips. Alright Dan. Any final words for our 100 or so new readers?
Dan: Yeah, I guess I wanna say thanks for reading this far. Your toilet break can only last so long before your ass gets numb. Oh and email us! I wanna hear thoughts, theme suggestions, or people telling me I don't understand music.
Ryan: Oh yeah. Let’s do a theme next week! Any ideas? A certain year or genre or even band?
Dan: My idea is I need a cigarette. I'll have my people email you.
[Editors note: After Dan’s cigarette we decided the next issue will be two albums from 2015.]