Waiting on the End Times

I haven't been going to the movies much the last few months, despite there being some movies that are so obviously my shit that I feel like a total dork for not making it to see them, but I go through phases where, frankly, I'm just not in the mood for movies.

For my paying subscribers, thank you so so much for supporting me. If you're a free subscriber and can afford a few bucks a month, I'd really appreciate anything you can offer. This week in place of a movie review I'm doing my best Pitchfork impression for new EP Proof of Life by the band Cloud District.

Being a good teenage punk in the oughts, I hated emo. And while some of the radio hits of the era were extremely annoying, I was also just ignorant of the genre. I also didn't happen to know any emo kids. I certainly didn't realize that, like 70s punks hating disco, anti-emo was kinda just bigotry, in our case homophobic reaction to theater kids. But I mean, I was a theater kid! And worse than a gay, a gay girl! Of course, I didn't know all of that at the time.

Ten years one new gender and one new sexuality later, in 2016, I finally got around to actually listening to some emo. And while I reevaluated some of the radio hits from my adolescence (Fall Out Boy's "Sugar, We're Going Down" and Panic! At the Disco's "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" are perfect car ride singalongs, and I'm not sorry) mostly I listened to newer bands.

And I was lucky, because, unbeknownst to me when I started, we were at the height of an emo revival. The revival took a lot of the lessons of the intervening years from math rock, folk punk and indie and integrated them with the grunge, pop punk and post-rock influences of earlier waves of emo, producing catchy, angry, chaotic and sad guitar music that was a perfect soundtrack for my suddenly re-adolescent heart (transitioning: you get to be a teenager again, emotionally).

On the poppier side I got into Blowout (their only full length No Beer, No Dad is a nearly perfect record imo), Retirement Party, Swearin', Their/They're/There and Good Looking Friends. On the more noisy and screamo end I adored Pool Kids, awakebutstillinbed, Algae Bloom, Dad Thighs and Stars Hollow.

But over and above all of them, one album reigned supreme. Don't Give Up, Skeleton (2018), the third release and first full-length from upstate New York four piece Cloud District, was everything I could ever want from emo, hell, from indie rock too. Angry, raw, grief-stricken, funny, catchy, and beautiful, it still sometimes, on what must be my something-hundredth listen, gives me chills and makes me cry.

Don't Give Up, Skeleton, which is processing the illness and death of lead singer and guitarist Brian Mccue's (I think?) father in Brian's teenage years, features some of the most heartfelt and nakedly vulnerable lyrics and vocal performances I've ever heard ("I've got friends who love me when I wont love myself/I've got friends who love me when I wont/love myself" "Somedays I don't feel like waking up/most days I don't feel like waking up/but I do"). The album also features basically perfect percussion; drummer Adam Susskind shifts seamlessly from driving four-on-the-floor punk runs to intricate post-rock polyrhythms, and does all of it in perfect support of (and occasional counterpoint with) the equally versatile guitars and alternately witty and heart-wrenching vocals.

The album– and it's an album, not a collection of songs, with a strong cohesive theme and vibe, and many tracks building and moving seamlessly one into the next–explores a lot of different modes, ranging from the acoustic simplicity of "Mug Drunk", a beautifully melancholic 90-second ode to a precarious life of art-making with your beloved, to the cascading orchestral soundscapes of the six minute instrumental "Necronomnomnomicon". Anyone who's been in a car or on a work site with me in the last six years has almost certainly sat through at least the album's pop-punky opening track, "Hamster Camp", and more than a few have been made fans by it.

I describe all of this (and quote the lyrics) from memory, because this album has seen me through two heartbreaks, four or five road trips, one pretty severe mental breakdown, and a pandemic. And unlike other albums that have been companions in moments of crisis, I still want to listen to this one even once I'm out of the worst.

Like so many beautiful things, the momentum of the emo revival was ended prematurely by the pandemic. While my musical tastes drifted in other directions, Don't Give Up, Skeleton remained in steady rotation. But other than an October, 2020 lockdown-composed instrumental "Polaris", a pretty electronic single reminiscent of nothing so much as the bedroom jams of Postal Service, Cloud District hadn't had any releases. Until two weeks ago.

It was going to be a struggle for anything to live up to what has become, as you may have ascertained by now, my most played, listened to and loved album of the last decade. But the new Cloud District EP, the six-track Proof of Life, (lol), shows that the Dont Give Up, Skeleton was no fluke.