A little bit of math never hurt anybody, either
Despite a childhood in the middle of America, I never got much into emo music. The clean vocals were too high for me to sing; I couldn’t do the screaming, and my mom wouldn’t let me cut my hair at an angle. So forgive me if my impressions/memory of the genre are a little, well, shallow. I still listen to MCR, of course, and can ask people to close the god damn door and all that, but mostly I left that genre in the same place I left my skateboard and my Etnies.
And then Calutron Girls, self-described as a post-hardcore band, came across my desk, and now I feel like an asshole. The jangling guitar, the extended instrumental opening, this is emo as hell, and it is sick. The guitar lines are athletic and smart, and Calutron’s frontman delivers the melody with the precision of the genre’s heroes. The band’s other single, released a month earlier than Thanks Kid, is only a bit heavier and still has plenty of phenomenal fucking melody to it.
Thanks Kid is, in the band’s words, “a PSA to thank your youth before letting it die.” And honestly, everything about this song screams that. There’s the high-energy drums, the booming chorus just built for screaming in the pit with your friends, but there’s a maturity to the chord structure, to the breaks and the choices made instrumentally, and a far-sightedness that might have been lacking from my introductions to the genre as a younger man.
If the term Post Hardcore scares you as a genre descriptor, reader, I get it. But there’s a real elegance to CG’s songs that should make you, and me, rethink our genre preferences a bit.
Great for fans of: Panic at the Disco (old and new), Fallout Boy, math rock (if it isn’t in crazy time signatures, is it just, like, algebra rock?), The Spill Canvas.
Written by Willow Stonebeck
