I am searching for some kind of hard yet melodic popish rock band to get into. Sure, I could just listen to my favorite band: Dinosaur Jr for the billionth time, those songs never get old, in fact they get better. I just want something new. I found a really long power pop playlist on Spotify, and I’m just blazing through it looking for one band that is kind of hard rocking but has melodic hooks that’ll stick in me. I saw this one band Charly Bliss cover Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” all pop punky and loved it, so I went and checked them out but I couldn’t dig in. Maybe I could use another good emo band, like prime era Saves The Day. I really went emo hunting and tried Thursday because I remember the cool emo girls in high school wearing Thursday shirts, and nothing grabbed me. I did find that there was a 20th anniversary release of Saves The Day’s “through being cool” that has all these demos that I used to have years ago. I really like their songs when they have less produced smoothness, so I was happy to add all of those to my Saves The Day playlist. I really can’t even tell you how much that band meant to me in 8th grade, I was smitten (and still go there occasionally). The first concert I ever saw without any adult supervision was Saves the Day and Hot Water Music (plus, my substitute teacher’s hardcore band openenung for them both). I don’t know what anything after “Stay What You Are” sounds like , maybe i could give that stuff a try.
Remind me to write my love letter to golden era emo sometime. I finally saw Piebald in 2017 and they were fucking sick.
Maybe I just need to get into Lifetime, and Sunny Day Real Estate (which I think is the proto-emo).
I love to find a band with a big back catalog to get obsessed with and make everyone listen to. I don’t care when the records came out, I just want them to be good and catchy. Maybe it’s an artist I only know a little bit of, and there’s a rich back catalog. I don’t know if I can force that to happen on purpose, but that doesn’t mean I’m not trying.
Spotify is so good, it’s my favorite part of the digital revolution of the last decade or so. They don’t pay me to tell you that. There’s these huge genre playlists I can run around in to find my new favorite band, it’s happened before. Maybe I need to try the “radio” feature of another one of my existing playlists.
Maybe someone reading this has a recommendation. what power pop, shoegaze or emo do i need to hear?
