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The Brave Little Abacus and just got back from the discomfort-we're alright: a magnum opus left in the trench of emo
1. Someone hitting "refresh" on my / Spinal cord is aching as if the earth / Like me, been shaking, shaken
I think it must have been around the start of the lockdown when I first started my disdain. We were all stuck inside playing video games with each other (as one did then) and I remember April begging me to listen to this one particular album, probably saying something along the lines of masterpiece and other then-thought hyperboles This was a particularly formative time for my taste - we were flagbearers in 'hyperpop' before it was even called that ('But I was there!') ; I was on a seemingly never-ending hiatus from the boys' school that had morphed me into a hip-hop head; I was sixteen.
In particular, this 2010 album was very long-windedly titled just got back from the discomfort-we're alright by Sandown, New Hampshire locals The Brave Little Abacus (TBLA), formed in 2007. All of the songs were largely spearheaded by the compositional guide of guitarist, vocalist, drummer and then college freshman Adam Demirjian. Assisting him was bassist Andrew Ryan and keyboardist Zach Kelly-Onett, both of whom also helped in writing. The band itself grew out of the roots of their previous band Eggplant Danceoff!, a "five to seven piece Ska band for like a year and change". just got back was the last full length album they released as band before breaking up in 2012.
I put it on uncaringly, as you do with music other people recommend you. Or rather, I clicked play on the forty-five minute YouTube video as it wasn't available on streaming services at this point in time. Admittedly, my listening was slightly mindless this first time round as I did my virtual rote tasks in the world of Minecraft. But something about it was impossibly piercing and pressing for my attention. I don't know if it was Demirjian's characteristically shrill cries and screams, the cacophony of synths over trumpets and chord organs and Malcolm in the Middle samples or the dense stream-of-consciousness lyrics. It was indescribable. It was confusion. All I knew was that something intangible had shifted.
But most importantly, it didn't actually click with me to begin with. Listening to Demirjian's vocals is something that takes getting used to for most people, even those most acquainted with whiny emo voices. Emeritus reviewer 'Trebor' wrote for SputnikMusic:
"Adam's vocals are a big part of the appeal of the album, but they also pose the greatest challenge. They're nasally, Adam has a lisp, they're rough around the edges - they take some getting used to. I've heard his voice described as 'Spongebob meets Isaac Brock [of Modest Mouse fame],' and I don't think that's far off."
It will often turn more people away than even more intense 'skramz' usually does. But as I began to listen more and more, they seemed to just work. Adam himself used the epithet 'Penguin Punk Weirdo Front-Boy' on the band's old last.fm page to urge people to listen to his new music, and even goes as far to say that he takes 'any criticism' for the way his voice sounds in TBLA. '[...] After many listens it becomes obvious that Demirjian's voice fits the music perfectly. The appeal of his strong confident, atypical voice grows and grows when the listener discovers how essential they are' (Trebor).
And so I began to fall in love with the album. Gradually, with every listen, it slowly made its way up my Topster until securing a solid place in the top 3. Eventually, I would interpret Demirjian's cry of "the fact I hate the way I talk" was literal, that it was somehow talking to all higher register, ex-squeaker guys in the entire world. This was my favourite thing he ever wrote for a long time.
2. And with you it, it gets harder to realize / It gets harder
But this is not an album review. This is my actual favourite lyric off the album, perhaps these days of my favourite lyrics I've ever heard. It is incredibly simple, which makes it a hard one to defend to snarky music nerds. But no one's lyric becomes their favourite just because of the words themselves, right?
A dangerous thing happens when you begin to associate words with a person, or a time, or a place. To my teenage self, it seemed like not just a few particular phrases, but rather every cryptic outburst had some kind of resonance to my life. At its core, just got back appears to be a simple story of some teenager really quite sad about some stuff. And for the most part, it is really just that. As Adam puts it, the record is about the 'dissolve of [...] a variety of relationships and perspectives'. It's more conceptually simple than their previous effort, Masked Dancers: Concern in So Many Things You Forget Where You Are (they do have a penchant for long titles), which loosely tackles themes of the natural world and Adam being kicked out of his high school music program, among other things. But during the writing of just got back, Adam began to realise he could "connect being a musician" to his interests in what he calls the "scholastic" - 'philosophy and music were becoming synonymous'.
'And as things grew more complicated / Conscious expansion cultivated / The books' ideas, songs' polyphony / Texture, content danced around me'.
With that in mind, the lyrics that Adam writes on just got back are even more dense than previous efforts. They take various forms from stream-of-consciousness, interpolations of Liz Phair and name-dropping philosophical theories to excerpts of an essay Adam wrote on 1987's animated feature The Brave Little Toaster. This complexity, then, I think is what allows in a paradoxical way an accessibility to personal adoration of Adam's lyrics. You're never going to truly understand what Adam is really talking about, so trying to explain all of a teenager's writerly ravings about failed relationships and general disillusionment from almost two decades ago is fruitless, and even kind of boring. It's much more enjoyable to experience Adam's lyrics through the raw words themselves, and for some reason, a few find resonance in our own lives.
And with you, it gets harder to realise, it gets harder.
The peak of summer, skating with April, our shirts sticking to our skin. She's just painted her board using POSCA pens to depict the first Glass Beach cover. I break my glasses when I drop in the bowl and hit a scooter kid who's not looking. It's left unsaid, but all we want to be was cool, not be cool, to fit in, to not fit in. We film shitty skate videos set to The Brave Little Abacus, or Brockhampton, or My Bloody Valentine, bomb down the empty parking lots in replacement of the suits in their Mercedes S Classes scared the government would never let them come back. In twelve days, my girlfriend at the time will break up with me. I remember pathetically posting close friends stories with my shirt off with only one person on them. This summer, I'm the weakest I'll ever be. I rely on compliments from online strangers in the small hours, even if I never speak to them again. In school, before the 'two weeks' of isolation to stop infection, I ask Mr. Barker after English class on how to be on your own, how to not have the safety net of someone else. He rightfully tells me I'm just a teenager, but wrongfully tells me about the other fish in the sea. When someone from Glass Beach messaged me about the photo I took of April's board, I immediately started gushing, saying how I 'loved' all the members , that they personally had helped me 'so much'. I would be the one to walk into the corner shop, put on a brave face with a picture of my passport with the third 0 in '2003' pasted over the 3 done on Snapchat - yes sir, I am a twenty year old man, I would like two of the big Smirnoff bottles, and perhaps crisps and a newspaper too... - to a disgruntled Pakistani uncle who cares too little to decline the cash. We thought getting drunk meant getting blackout: putting on records screaming the lyrics watching old Eastern European films being pretentious strumming the acoustic guitar as loud as you can singing Neutral Milk Hotel or The Antlers or 100 gecs or your own made up songs spit flying through your broken braces or making out in a pile of leaves bruising each other's necks like those wild young people do or now someone's slumped over at the feet of the sofa instead of on it or you break one of the nice pint glasses and you're laughing picking up the pieces and you put on the brave face again when their dad comes home with the "when I was young..." look or you step out with untied shoes into the streets as if nothing can hurt you and pet cats for too long.
3. This is my resignation from the S-C-E-N-E.
'I was really fed up with a bunch of the quote-unquote alternative that I was surrounded by [...] I felt like it was strangely disingenuous. I felt like people were not an alternative of much [...] I was a complete elitist in and of myself [...] embracing, you know, maybe more pop music [...] feeling a little bit like, outsider-ish for what I liked or how I liked it and it not being like hip or whatnot.'
It's already quite a shameful thing to associate with emo, as the name itself has been rejected by countless bands labelled under the genre (Rogers). 'Emo' stems from the term emotional hardcore, which reduced to 'emocore' before simply becoming 'emo'. A lot of the older bands often prefer terms like punk or just hardcore, likely due to the name itself inciting raised hairs and eyerolls. It's a term that's been dragged down with the dirge of early 2000s pop-punk bands that dominated the charts. The label even seemed confusing to TBLA themselves, as Adam found only later after the band had broken up through college friends that 'people on the internet think that Brave Little Abacus is an emo band'. 'The only thing we were called while we were a band was math'.
But it is perhaps even worse to have to admit you weren't even there for it. I was never "in the scene". And while it would have been nigh-impossible for 7 year old me to be in the local New Hampshire shows of the band, it's still something that makes the admitted affinity even more embarrassing. TBLA were basically unknown outside of their local shows before their internet "revival" many years later. They never made physical copies for just got back, didn't know about touring or self-promotion. It only began to get popular through internet music communities such as 4chan's music board and Reddit.
What I would like to propose here then, is the existence of "net-scenes". I will define the net-scene as a strictly Internet based "faux-scene" that signifies the creation of community in circumstances that would not otherwise allow it. In most cases, this will be due to time (relatively not too long here), or geographical difference. Importantly, this is different to fans of older music, or music from different countries. Rather, it is the resurgence of support for music that would otherwise be forgotten or unloved if it were not for the efforts of Internet communities. While indie music labels are seemingly getting obscured in the name of making it to a big-shot playlist curator, netizens are the ones propagating unappreciated music to the masses of a new generation. The most evident and drastic case of this is the band Panchiko, a late 90s amalgamation of alt. rock and trip-hop. While their CD had grown dusty on a charity shop shelf, Internet music fans (4chan basement dwellers) revived it (Camp). Mystique often catalyses the allure of these musicians – the less information out there on them, naturally the more people are inclined to show for either righteous or prideful reasons, that everyone needs to listen. TBLA also had a lot of perceived mystique around them, largely in part due to the band's breakup pre-dating a social media presence. Net-scenes have become increasingly common, especially after the COVID era where exposure to new music was largely limited to the web.
There are, however, many pitfalls to net-scenes. Carried on from the dim mosh-pits is again the fear of being a poser, as to again borrow from Losing My Edge, we indulge in a 'borrowed nostalgia'. 'I'm losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978'. What, you only listened to them after they blew up on TikTok? Well, of course you like the famous one, it was used in that one show.
Net-scenes also commonly promote albums through meme culture. Meme culture, or the context that goes around what gets to be made/shared as memes "memed", has a propensity to promote the extremes of culture, or things easily applicable to multiple scenarios, particularly in this case easily manipulated album covers. For example, experimental hip-hop outfit Death Grips is very extreme, leftfield and features recognisable album iconography. Neutral Milk Hotel has been kind of memed to death due to its rather peculiar lyricism and easily image macro-able cover. In the case of TBLA, due to their relative obscurity outside of emo circles, this hasn't occurred as much. However, they're definitely in the same boat of having an easily "memeable" album cover, through people replacing the cover picture of Adam's father with their favourite anime characters and so on. I've seen a video replacing the vocals in "pile! no pile! pile!" with an AI SpongeBob voice. While I don't think The Brave Little Abacus will ever get memed to death in the same way, it can be a slightly jarring feeling at first for something so tentatively fond to me to be made the butt of a joke in a way. Contrastingly, Adam instead felt 'so moved' hearing a fan mashup of "boy's theme" and the song from Space Jam as it seemingly proved the instrumental ballad's compositional worth.
//I asked my good friend Daisy, who used to run a very popular music "meme" account (which has now just become more general shitposting).
Does the 'memeification' of albums and bands lead to a sort of commodification / tokenisation? Perhaps unavoidable, but does the cross between art and internet posting lead to a slight corruption of the media intended to be engaged with seriously?
"I think that for the most part, the 'memeification' does not affect the artistic output of established artists, as often there is a tangible disconnect between them and their fanbases in line with the culture pre-internet, however I believe that due to the accessibility of interaction in the current climate, upcoming musicians may be more discernibly affected by this 'memeification' as they attempt to appeal to younger audiences. A prominent example lies in emo band, 'Hot Mulligan', who attempt to identify with younger generations through ironic (or post-ironic) song titles and lyrics that would be considered tacky and passe by many, but to others a clear beacon of engagement with the thriving internet culture. Equally, artists such as noise-pop duo Black Dresses have criticised the mass consumption of the internet age as a result of the trivialisation of their lyricism. They particularly criticised how their album 'WASTEISOLATION' was arguably condensed into a fleeting, Tik-Tok vignette wherein none of their lyrical complexity and seriousness is allowed to shine through, acting as a background for brief clips of teenagers dancing. The album addresses the duo's experience with childhood sexual assault. Therefore, the lack of tact in broaching this from fans (or those unaware of the band themselves, leeching onto the sound-bite) seems directly consequential of virality, and the abstraction of music and art more widely in the internet sphere."
Would you call the Internet's music culture and community an overall net good, i.e. helping new people discover music who wouldn't otherwise? Or again, does it just seem to taint the artistic integrity of the albums/artists in the first place?
"I have personally had a very varied experience with the music community on the internet. On one hand, I am immensely grateful to it for the friends that I have made, and reams of music that have been discovered through these friends and the community more widely. However, I do fear that much of the online music community gets very caught up in image and perception as opposed to mere enjoyment of music. I remember especially a few years ago, 'Topsters' were exceedingly popular, exhaustive charts wherein you rank your favourite albums. I made lots myself, and remember seeing them as a constant broadcasting of one's taste to others. I think this is fun and constructive on one hand, as it allows people to bond over shared interests, but it also seemed to develop a sort of niche popularity contest (this was arguably symptomatic of the culture as a whole), wherein everyone was trying to prove how 'obscure' and 'eclectic' their taste in music was. This kind of toxicity seems to have wavered now, or maybe I just engage with it a lot less, but I remember that as an online teenage girl, it was a strange thing to interact with! Not very healthy, I don't think."
You made a choice to step away from posting exclusively music related posts, did any of these kinds of thoughts influence this change you made? Although being a teenager, did you feel that in parts accounts like yours were responsible for commodifying art? Or is it just a natural part of media's lifecycle?
"I think that my account was definitely a perpetrator of this commodification, even though I don't think I was conscious of this at the time. Most of my teens were spent running this account, so as I matured and grew myself, I like to think that it matured with me (to an extent haha). When I started out, I definitely felt myself trying to fit in with what others were posting and creating, and I think the aforementioned toxicity of parts of the culture were absolutely what made me step away from primary engagement with the 'online music community'. I remember experiencing quite nasty, cruel misogyny quite often, and I think I decided that it just wasn't worth it. I also think that the cycle of posts that were being created grew more and more stale the longer I remained in the community. There's only so many PNGs of a band you can slap impact font one-liners on, and it became more and more obvious that the bands didn't really appreciate it. I know that bands such as Black Midi grew to detest this 'memeification', and some speculate whether it was the treatment of their music and the members themselves that led to them eventually disbanding. I do feel some guilt for perpetuating the 'meme culture' but also feel that it was symptomatic of the time, and the media cycle like you say. Mostly, it was just (largely) like-minded teenagers trying to create stuff and have fun over the lockdown (and before), and for the most part I believe it to be harmless. But of course it had issues, and these issues are ultimately what caused me to step away, although I retain the friends that I've made and am still glad that I took part!"
//In a very real way then, net-scenes are both resuscitating and perhaps suffocating artists perceptions in a completely unprecedented way. Bands that have gained popularity in this way, e.g. Duster, who was virtually forgotten until their song 'Gold Dust' blew up on TikTok, or Pavement's resurgence through B-Side 'Harness Your Hopes'. In a strange funny way, I had followed Daisy's account before ever even meeting her. I guess them's the net-scenes.
Net-scenes are now influencing a new generation of artists, especially in the emo scene. The "fifth-wave emo" scene we are currently in now (or post-emo, or goddamn whatever you want to call it) is particularly influenced by the sounds of The Brave Little Abacus, cited as an influence by many of the current scene's top artists like Parannoul, Weatherday, Glass Beach,Asian Glow and Your Arms Are My Cocoon. The current generation of emo artists' are indebted to TBLA's dense palimpsest of sounds and influences, myself included. Its likely largely in part due to the fact that TBLA's influences are so far-spread rather than being solely influenced from emo, including The Flaming Lips, They Might Be Giants, animated film soundtracks such as The Brave Little Toaster, and keyboardist Zach Kelly-Onett's years of study into microtonal music, that their effect on emo music and status as the most important band to the developments in modern emo music could be achieved.
It is important to note that fifth-wave emo has a noticeably queer voice at the forefront of it. "The derision with which the word was used-the implication of its very tonality-suggested that 'emo' had also become an updated shorthand for 'faggot.' You'd often hear people say things like, "What are you, fucking emo?" We all knew what that meant. [...] I knew that's what I was" (Brannon).
The roots of emo have beginnings in the hardcore scene that gave refuge to the cishet white guys and not much room for else. Many of the men in the emo scene have taken advantage of their status with vulnerable female fans (Pelly). 'Too often, the choice in punk rock and D.I.Y. spaces for non-white men is a choice between tokenized, or being invisible' (Abdurraquib 56).
In an interview with modern emo band Foxtails, it's instead highlighted how 'the otherness of being queer and a person-of-color consciously and unconsciously [seep] into Megan's lyrics [...] "One of the things I've always admired about other POC in the scene is that they aren't afraid to place themselves in the middle. They aren't afraid to be loud, and as an effect, other POC feel more empowered to join".
Nearly every single one of the bands mentioned earlier that list TBLA as an influence are queer or feature queer members. It's not just the synths and experimental songwriting that links the influence of TBLA to fifth-wave musicians. It is community. To very loosely borrow from Maggie Nelson, it could be said that the music of TBLA has been queered through its net-scene revival, that is to say not that it is queer as in of itself. Rather, akin to how Nelson writes on art piece Puppies and Babies by A.L. Steiner. While '[some] of the subjects [...] may not identify as queer', the music's resuscitation similarly 'partakes in a long history of queers constructing their own families' (Nelson 90). Lee Edelman writes of queerness as naming the Other, the side opposed: 'figures, outside and beyond its political symptoms, the place of the social-orders death drive' (Edelman 3). What other kind of group, operates on definition through negation? The scene kids we may pass off as cringe now are in a long history of negation to the "mainstream", just as the hardcore kids did before them. In other words, the cycle of marginalised communities finding joint respite and inspiration in albums like just got back is akin to a positive feedback loop of what Edelman might call the jouissance. The experience of listening to an album as texturally dense and overwhelming, such as just got back is the same free unravelling that the mosh pit provides.
4. And at some point, it stops.
I'm at a party. A lot of people are off their heads or drunk as lords. There's a seemingly never-ending argument over the best British sitcoms, an unfinished Scrabble game that I got too worked up over as this guy opened with fucking 'Cuba', a tape of Neon Genesis Evangelion rolling on forever on a tiny CRT TV, stubbed out fags in an NHS nurse's mug, countless shoes at the door, homemade pizza with an egg cracked on it because hey it's continental, the yolk has turned to a fat amber marble and the whites have turned to PVC.
I'm speaking to a girl I don't know in one of the annuls of the house about emo music. The ritual starts up again, "hey, you must know THESE guys", "you like THAT band right?" I suddenly remembered, that I had a brief encounter over DMs with her weeks before, replying to a story showing off her Brave Little Abacus tattoo. It felt incredibly strange to see; it was slight frustration mixed with euphoria. I had the exact same tattoo idea. The silhouette of Masked Dancers, which I also wanted to get with the falling shadows from Elliot Smith's self-titled cover. Right there, on her arm, where I also wanted it. I messaged her this. She told me that she had shot for two popular fifth-wave emo bands. Two people in those different bands had also got the exact same tattoo. At the party, she pulls up her sleeve to show me. In seeing it, in the flesh, it feels like nothing else someone could have said or did could be such a signifier of shared experience.
Now, as I'm looking to find a place to get my own tattoo in Tokyo, I think about if I had never been shown this album, if I had never spent all those dark summer nights listening to Adam sing in my room. These Internet strangers, the same ink on their skin, the same faceless figure. Disconnected by distance, age, lives. But we had all been mopey teenagers once. And for some reason, that brings a smile to my face.