Cleveland Browns defensive end Myles Garrett sported a Dragonball Z visor a few weeks ago. He’s a bit younger than me however we might share the same emotional connection to the father-son Kamehameha. Maybe we share even more. I’ve gotten to an age where current sports stars and musicians at their apex share the same decade of birth. We grew up in the same popular culture. Watched the same TV shows. Listened to the same music. All of us influenced by similar moments with different paths in our lives.
Jade Lilitri and I experienced many of the same influences. His band Oso Oso got my attention two years ago but I became a fan when the “gb/ol h/nf” single came out last summer. The track title is an abbreviation for goodbye old love, hello new friends. Those lyrics read like an endless tragic cycle, like an elephant chained to a circus ring, yet sounds so optimistic. Washed Up Emo’s interview with Lilitri unveiled Oso’s influences, which came between 2004-2005 pointing specifically to My Chemical Romance, The Used, and Bayside as significant bands. I purchased Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge around the same time when I moved to California in 2005. Quite the fork from my obsession with Slipknot’s Vol. 3.
I got into Thursday back in Philly watching MTV almost every day. Slipknot’s video for “Duality” took me hostage for a while. Thanks to MTV, again, I started getting into emo after MCR helped bring the word into American households. Bayside wasn’t far behind for me either. It’s important Lilitri listened to those bands and the myriad of other bands before and after MCR. Funny how I left the fertilest ground for this kind of music. Almost fifteen years later here comes Oso Oso progressing emo forward with ensnaring mathy riffs amply savory beyond the scene. The third record Basking in the Glow came out August 16th to footnote emo at the end of this decade.
Perfect record for me at the perfect time. Musically the arrangements remain simple, focusing on Oso’s strengths: hook riff upon hook riff. Call Lilitri the emo Dimebag Darrell with his inexhaustible repertoire of “money riffs” as Phil Anselmo would say. Lyrically Oso continues leveraging coherent and happy lyrics with purposely underlying omissive and recidivist lines. Reminds me a bit of Brennan Taulbee (Oceana) mumbling the most abstract verses to singing and/or screaming the simplest choruses. “A Morning Song” and “The View” especially hit on this duality while “Wake Up Next to God” and “Impossible Game” come to grips with Lilitri’s life and career, on the cusp, beyond falling back on old habits.
You can draw the time line from Brand New’s Your Favorite Weapon and Tell All Your Friends to Oso Oso now. “Jude Law and a Semester Abroad” sounds so much like Oso’s first album. “Dig” resonates what came after for BN, minus the sexual misconduct. Another outline can be drawn to Japan where metalcore from around the world galvanized an underbelly of millennials to pick up the same music. My intuition says the guys in Crystal Lake or even Sable Hills went to the same Acacia Strain shows in 2009. Those kinds of shows fostered this new generation pushing the scene forward embracing the crushing weight of TAC, and the majesty Parkway Drive bring to a live show.
Japanese metalcore is having its moment. The scene reflects the bands who toured through Nippon in the 2000’s, adding their own tropes. Crystal Lake’s Helix and Sable Hill’s Embers stand out with their flexibility to shift between circle pit and festival anthemism to Acacia Strain dump trucking. Sable Hills have a little more Trivium in them with their Power Ranger guitar acrobatics. Graupel do a bit of the same veering between Parkway Drive’s Deep Blue to Veil of Maya breakdowns. Sounds wicked but with stark transitions. Paledusk likes going djenty more than the others yet succeed more on songs like “Lovers” and “Light” leaning into melodic leads, rather than Attila-ish rapcore and starter pack djent.
All these bands inject these serenely zen sections into their song structures. I don’t have a better word to describe how it all resonates, but ostensibly these sections remind me of my travels in Japan. You have to hear it for yourself. Typically this type of tactic gets drowned out in other band’s sounds yet these groups integrate it in a variety of ways using clean tones and melodies, strategically, in their own space, or overdubing heavy sections. These “cleans” uniquely belong to these bands and the scene sorely needs refreshing ideas like these.
It’s been beautiful to experience how sound influences us around the world. Music is one of the few things that brings us together. “Old Town Road” spent 19 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, a new record. An openly gay African American singing a country-rap song was the most popular tune during the most destabilizing political times this century. Donald Trump is the President and Lil Nas X tops the charts. Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think? Yeah, especially when “bad guy” Billie Eilish, a 17 year-old, brought X down, to the chagrin of a certain close friend. What might be wryer is the music I like now and how I experience it versus ten years ago.
In 2010 I was buying most of my music on iTunes or online retailers, occasionally at brick and mortar stores, which were experienced through an iPod. Today the only music I purchase for the most part is on vinyl. Otherwise I stream music on my phone. This occurrence is polarizing and yet so common. It’s like two ends of a canyon. Phonograph records are the oldest popular medium still around where streaming is the newest, yet both are in vogue. Amyl and The Sniffers represent the same delta boasting 70’s punk and the Cosmic Psychos from their home country. Their record sounds like it came out over forty years ago but yet couldn’t have. Amy Taylor would not have existed in the same way. She still encounters “casual sexism” but after seeing them live Taylor’s just a badass fronting a badass band.
It didn’t matter that Taylor was a woman on stage fronting. The show sold out. I got kicked in face during “Got You” as fans ravaged the Soda Bar. She was a fucking rockstar motioning for everyone to bring their own physical energy, hollering her commands to the crowd. All of us fed from her hand. More and more women have risen above the typical sexist barriers and the saturated music market over this decade. Julien Baker, Lizzo, Kehlani, I can go on. Amy Taylor put herself on that list. Maybe I’m too young or ignorant to know any better but has there been a better time in music for women? Not just the pop stars, but overall for all female musicians. From 2010 onward, woman lead projects have become a regular occurrence on my top 10 albums of the year lists.
I could say the same thing for hip hop which has enjoyed continued growth and prosperity over the past forty plus years. You’d think the genre should have plateaued this decade yet its commercial viability keeps reaching bigger heights. We had “Drake Watch” during the NBA Finals on ESPN every night. Whatever Drake was doing at the games mattered as much to the general public as the outcome of the games. The community of hip hop simply refer to the genre as “the culture” now. I find that incredibly powerful. I’m envious as a metal fan our word “metal” doesn’t have the same kind of weight today. If the 2000’s were about hip hop becoming the most popular form of music in America, then I define the last ten years by how technology allowed an artist like YBN Cordae to raise out from the internet into stardom before his 21st birthday.
By age 20, Cordae Amari Dunston released three mixtapes under the moniker Entendre. As he turns 22 this month Cordae’s first album The Lost Boy debuted at 13 on the Billboard 200. I’m usually apprehensive of records with more than ten songs; however, this one justified it’s fifteen track length. The features make sense with Cordae’s vibe. I’m not a Meek Mill fan but his appearance on “We Gon Make it” fits the game plan. The themes run through unpacking the loss of his grandmother to respecting the game and giving back to the culture. He’s only scratched the surface of what he’ll become as he grows into his 20’s. If he can make a m.A.A.d city-ish banger like “Broke As Fuck” on a whim, imagine what he’ll do when takes the time to write a record the way Kendrick Lamar does. I can daydream about this stuff.
Tyler Childers lived within my reveries but actually exists now. I enjoy how country sounds but hate what most of the 21st century artists talk about: Bud Light, trucks, and sugar shakers. Here’s my decree; fuck Florida Georgia Line. Country needs Childers now and into the future. The Guardian’s profile piece hits every note you’d need to argue the case. No one else seems more qualified than the son of a strip miner to parse the impact of mining towards the planet and its workers. His defiance towards the establishment in Nashville echos throughout his third record Country Squire.
Stories of blue collar workers, one skiving off weed to pass random testing, another an Avon woman regretting her decisions in life. Tales of balancing a career, a wife, and longing to settle down with her back in Kentucky. Admittedly my understanding of country tropes and literary devices remain uneducated; however, Childers opened the Stargate to this universe. He’s drawn me to his producer and song-writing extraordinaire, Sturgill Simpson, whose fourth studio album Sound & Fury drops September 27th. Check out the leading single Sing Along featuring clips of the accompanying anime film due out on Netflix September 29th.
These artists represent different sub-sections of the culturally chaotic times we find ourselves in. Childers draws on divergent thinking to “recognise people being ignored by their own genres.” Amyl and The Sniffers preserve yet progress gritty dive rock with their feminism. Jade Lilitri and YBN Cordae simply offering incredible song writing at ripe ages. The globe seems to wobble more each day, not just in America. Erratic behavior exhibited both from governments and citizens imposes an unpredictable future. Using history we can foresee and prophecize how artists will respond to these events. The 1980’s birthed hardcore in response to Reaganism. Bob Marley articulated the struggles of oppression and poverty not only in Jamaica but the world. Perhaps some of these voices will inspire planetary balance and unity.
Disaesthetic 