#9: My Blue Heaven // Six EPs
[John Wilson voice] Hey, New York. [/John Wilson voice]
It’s been a while. Here’s a little narrative in honor of the recent 15-year anniversary of Taking Back Sunday’s Louder Now.
The year is 2009. I’m in my first year of high school and swim season has mercifully come to a close, no longer do I have to be driven to my local neighborhood pool in the afternoons to perform my genuinely terrible butterfly stroke along the surface of a somehow mutually over-chlorinated and under-sanitary body of water while surrounded by an embarrassingly large congregation of the student population. No longer do I have to squirm my glaringly pale and skinny body into executing a motion I am simply not strong enough to carry out properly, a so-called right of passage to hold down the butterfly 100-meter race just because none of the older swimmers want to do that particular stroke. No longer can I hear the muffled sounds of the bystanders above the surface straining not to give up on me after the kids from the other schools had long ago finished their runs. No, this was my time now.
I took the bus home now which was kind of miserable. I had missed half a year of riding it to go to swim meets and I had missed my opportunity to make friends here. Although I’m pretty sure it always would have turned out this way—rushing as quickly as I can to an empty row of seats toward the back of the bus, plugging in my perpetually half-broken earbuds, and playing something to carry me through the following 25 minutes of not being able to speak to a stranger my own age. I have a distinct memory of listening to some of my favorite records ever for the first time under these circumstances, turning the volume up on something like We Have The Facts and We’re Voting Yes to bring the gentle sound above the caustic rumble of the bus.
Yes, this was my time. The sun blaring against the window, the unpredictable Florida showers adding another layer of noise. When the bus was about to pull up to my stop, I knew I had to drop everything though. It was time to find a different kind of song, not something I was just getting to know. I needed something I knew too well. Something I had forcefully ingrained into the fabric of my life, possibly too deeply into my still-developing personality. It’s embarrassing but who cares. If you’re gonna do it, do it when you’re 15 years old—love something too much that has absolutely no ability to love you back.
The kind of song I’m talking about here has to have a particular moment of drama at a particular moment of time. It has to build to a boiling point that, at this age, you can barely believe is possible. It has to feel really fucking good when it launches off the face of the earth, perfectly coinciding with that moment when your collapsing Converse sneaker collides with the sizzling tropical pavement.
So sue me, I was an anxious little 9th grader with main-character syndrome, whomst among us wasn’t? Sometimes I’d pause the song or replay the chorus to get the timing just right, but you better believe that when I got off that bus I was pretending not to be on in the first place, I did it in style, at least in my little head. Most often, the song was “My Blue Heaven” by Taking Back Sunday, an operatic rock song that builds to an even more spectacular finale. An orchestral bridge gives way to a calm, swaying moment when Adam Lazzara whispers and strains his voice somehow all at the same time. At exactly 2:54, the song goes completely quiet and Lazzara takes a deep breath and finishes the sentence he started earlier—“you are safe”—the guitars and the chaos charging back in alongside him.
Look, it was a rush. I’m thinking now of what I must have looked like, speed-walking with my stiff skinny legs to keep the pace with that surge of energy that just kicked in through my earbud, maybe even both the left and the right one if I was lucky that day. I think I really must have looked like I was running from something as the other kids on the bus just kind of sauntered off like normal people in the direction of their houses. But I was creating a scene in my head, and I think for those few minutes—especially at the 2:54 mark of “My Blue Heaven”—I wasn’t really thinking about what they were thinking. And that’s probably a tiny miracle, that I felt safe for just a moment in the thrill of a really good rock song.
I’ve been thinking a lot about EPs and the weird kind of space they occupy when we talk about music. Part of this must have been lodged in my head from the way the Florida emo band Home Is Where has fought tooth and nail for their 6-song record I Became Birds to be talked about as a full-length and not as an EP. But what I’m thinking about here is not so much what is and isn’t an LP—I think the lines are blurry enough that usually I just call the thing whatever the artist says it should be called—but instead why EPs kind of end up getting a downgraded position in my head when a lot of times I like them just as much as the full-lengths that come out in any particular year. Every June and December, when it comes time to compose mid-year or end-of-the-year lists, I find myself having the same debate in my head—should I include the EPs alongside the LPs on my list. And it usually goes the same way—I answer that question with a “sure, why not!” and then I find myself stripping out the EPs for the most part and leaning much more heavily on the full-lengths.
There’s probably some bias about perceived level of effort in the way that it’s easy to think that more songs equals more work equals more deserving of recognition. But that’s totally bullshit and doesn’t make sense at all. I can think of hundreds of LPs that should have lopped off five songs and left behind a shorter but ultimately perfect body of work. Refining and editing takes a lot of effort (which is why my book is barely edited five months after I planned to start) and saying goodbye to songs that just shouldn’t make the cut can be heartbreaking business. But I think about certain bands that were, in my opinion, best served in the EP format (credit to Young Statues for Age Isn’t Ours and All Get Out for Movement), and I wonder if I’m fucking something up by leaving something out of the running just because of what essentially amounts to a label at the end of an Apple Music album title.
What I’m trying to say here is that some really fantastic EPs have come out this year and I want to shout out a few of them. Hold on, I’m picking an arbitrary number. Ok. Here are six EPs:
(T-T)b — Suporma
My rule of thumb these days is to pay attention to anything that comes out on Acrobat Unstable. I was a few weeks late to Suporma because I wasn’t being diligent with following that rule, but this thing came around at just the right time. I’d say this is an emo band with a chiptune edge rather than being what I might define as full chiptune—the gameboyish sounds kind of fit in alongside the other elements nicely. I am enamored with that wispy, phasing sound that runs through “Daisy,” like from a part of a videogame that takes place in a gently windy field.
Hey, ilu! — Internet Breath
The mixture of styles here is wild! This is an aesthetic I would more commonly associate with chiptune, a kind of more generally hyperactive way of using the sounds, but this EP goes in all kinds of directions. I like it when they get a little heavier and faster like at the end of “DigitalLung.exe” or the quick punk rock song “Projection Joins the Battle.”
Camp Trash — Downtiming
It’s pop rock gold! I said this on twitter this week but I always listen to this EP multiple times in a row. This is one you’ll want to have in your rotation as the weather starts to get warmer.
Snow Ellet — Suburban Indie Rock Star
Suburban Indie Rock Star obviously calls back to a lot of early 2000s emo/pop-rock sounds, but the one comparison that I haven’t seen anyone bring up is the first All-American Rejects record. That is to say that the drum sound is a dead ringer for “My Paper Heart” and that Snow Ellet sounds like a future pop star making incredibly infectious songs in their bedroom.
american poetry club — do you believe in your heart?!
I wrote about this a few months ago for The Alternative, but I absolutely love this release and everyone should be listening to it. I think this could be one the band would call a full album rather than an EP, I’m a little fuzzy on that, but if you’re a fan of Broken Social Scene or early Los Campesinos! you really need to hear this one.
Thank You Thank You — Next to Nothing
This is a really unique-sounding indie pop EP from songwriter Tyler Bussey (The World Is…, Strange Ranger). I have this on cassette and it’s one of my go-tos in that format, especially in the morning while I’m reading or having a cup of coffee.
Thanks for sticking with me. Let’s run it back to the 2:54 mark, baby:
See ya next time.
My name is Jordy Walsh, and I’m a writer based in Philadelphia. I write about music for The Alternative and Slant Magazine. I Keep a Diary is a newsletter about music, books, writing, and probably a lot of vague emotions. You can follow me on Twitter for more thoughts on all that stuff and also a lot of pictures of my dog. Thanks for joining me.