Evans Blue - The Melody and the Energetic Nature

I was going to do Spoon's They Want My Soul, but i heard "Cold(But I'm Still Here)" by Evans Blue today, so i'm going to listen to their debut album instead. It has a good title, The Melody and the Energetic Nature of Volume. See, told you it's a good title. But, it's from 2006.

It's no secret that the mid 2000s to the mid 2010s is like Bottle kryptonite, the audio equivalent of dunking an oreo in ketchup. I've mentioned a few bands from that time frame, and i'll mention a few more. I like some stuff from that period of rock radio wilderness, but there's a Harry to my Hendersons, a giant brown bear in my cabin in The Great Outdoors and it's the hard side of rock. Emo, biker rock, nu-metal, you remember. We did the grungy flannel, we took a shower, then we just kind of walked off into the woods and started screaming nonsense at the trees about how much our high school manbearpig boy/girlfriends were terrible people and we're sad. I like quite a lot of it actually (well, except the hardcore crotch-rocket stuff and low grade nu-metal garbage). 

Did Evans Blue get really big and popular? Unquestionably, no. This is Evanescence, Flyleaf, Chavelle, Breaking Benjamin, Avenged Sevenfold territory, and EB are B (possibly C) team back ups with Hawthorn Heights, Skillet, Three Days Grace, and Shinedown.

That's not fair, i literally only know the 1 song. They could be greatly underappreciated. They could, don't look at me like that.

Ok, fine, they could be garbage like Finger 11 or Our Lady Peace, or Seether. Cold sounds like Tool/APC crossed with Chavelle. Only one way to find out...

Not a great opener. It's not a bad song, just not a good opener. You might have to get used to Kevin Matisyn's voice. Ahhh! Don't do that stupid falsetto note at the end of a phrase. Rewrite the whole song if you have to, just don't do it. 

The music is fine, but it's impossible to ignore the Maynard comparison. What's with that warbly thing, Kev? 

I know it's hard to tell, but i'm liking it quite a lot. For starters, they've nailed the aesthetic. This is serious depression, scared to say anything, emotional plane crash type stuff. It's supposed to be whiny and a bit deranged because it's that non-objective kind of emotional insanity at the edge of a panic attack type thing.

Oh yeah, i remember Beg, it got quite a bit of radio play. It's all just pop-rock with massive low-end and high gain crunch, by the way. The one thing they do way too much is the cut out, anacrusis to the last chorus. On the whole, though, the first half is great.

Oh no, is the second half going to be all her fault and his justification for turning into a douchebag? If Over is that turning point, i'm gonna be mad. It's fine if you're part of the problem, it's even fine if you fail, but you lose me when you twist it around and forget you're the insane loser in this story.

Ok good, Possession gets us fully back into the me me me frame. Nice save, guys. Dark That Follows is interesting, he's arguing with himself about it. Believe me, you don't get that psychological complexity very often from this stuff.

I'm impressed, this is great. I'm going to let you into a really important aspect of good emo that you don't get from surface listening. Really good emo has total pronoun confusion. It actually takes work to remove all the signifiers for which character says what. "You" often refers to the character singing, and "i" actually represents a quote from the other character. Bad emo comes across whiny and selfish because it's very clear that the singing character is a self absorbed lunatic with at least one restraining order and possibly even a parole officer. Good emo is impossible to tell if your hearing a conversation with a mirror, or if everything is in quotation marks. 

They changed singers in 2009 and Dan Chandler is much more tough guy than Jonathan Davis crazy, but albums 2 and 3 with Kevin might be worth checking out.

Overall i'd give it a "yeah, this is good." 4ish stars on the scale of 1 to crying on the sidewalk. Check it out if you like this dark, negative emotion stuff like i do.