Godseyes - Progress//Regress

K, like if I just said "hey, wanna listen to a Long Island Metalcore album with Industrial-style samples and Jazz Saxophone intro/interlude/outro and one song mostly in Portugese?," you'd be like "that can't possibly be good."

But it is. Really, really good. I mean, you're not going to have any idea what actual things Godseyes is metalcoring about, but you'll totally understand the emo they feel about them. 

I don't understand why the Sax solos aren't sarcastic, but they aren't. Progress//Regress is a straight up masterclass on the generally intangible concept of Flow. It's not a single piece of music from start to finish, but you can't really dissect it either. You start at the beginning and you end at the end, and aside from the somehow not-sarcastic interlude, there's nothing you can skip or rearrange along the way. It just is a thing you listen to from start to finish, and afterward say "wow, that was cool."

You see, Emo is one of those super confusing genres that isn't a musical genre at all. Like Grunge, Emo gets it's definition from what it opposes rather than what it sounds like, so it comes in stages or waves. The things people call grunge are all sarcastic t-shirt and jeans rebellion against Mainstream Glam and theatrics. Similarly, first-wave Emo was a rebellion against the socio-political concerns of Hardcore Punk, emphasizing how these socio-political issues make us feel rather than what they are and how we should resolve them. The sadness, anger, jealousy, depression, etc. is now the topic, not whatever trivial problem caused it. Second-wave Emo, or what most people call Midwest Emo/Math Rock is equally a Midwestern rebellion against Bourgeois Suburban isolation, but how you react to feeling isolated, lonely, and incapable of moving forward is more important than what causes you to feel that way in the first place; trying to overpower it by putting on a fake smile and extroverting at parties is the thing to be skeptical about. Third-wave, often called Screamo, is generally a revival of the anti-authoritarian Punk ethos of first-wave Emo, either in the form of Alt-Rock/Pop-Punk or Post-Rock. Again, it's all about how the situation made you feel, not whether the situation was important or even actually happened the way you perceive/describe it. Punk is to active rebellion against authority as Emo is to passive reactionism to perceived authoritarianism. Where Punk errs on the side of giving it's subject too much intellectual credit for its supposed malicious intent, Emo indulges delusional self-victimization to the point of psychosis. 

Godseyes manages to avoid all those pitfalls by not even clarifying who or what caused these feelings in the first place. All we know is it was so overwhelming that at one point he had to revert to Portugese to even talk about it. Then we fade to black as the saxophonist solos and the guys talk about how well it flows in the studio.

So we're listening to the abstract mental image inspired by describing how they're going to assemble the album as it progresses then regresses. Phenomenal.