Week of 10/20: Tigers Jaw, The New Pornographers, Mac Miller
Eli writes about emo, Eric warmly returns to a piece of their indie-rock canon, and Michael is feeling good about his favorite Mac Miller tape hitting streaming.
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him), Eric Bennett (they/them), Michael Brooks (he/him) and Miranda Reinert (she/her). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. On Substack, we’re also a weekly roundup of songs. Our format is simple: each of our four hosts picks a song they love and writes about it. There will be one free post every week, and more at the end of every month for paid subscribers. For the sake of your wallet, don’t start a paid subscription on Substack. Instead, sign up at the 2$ tier or higher on Patreon and we will gift you a subscription.
Tigers Jaw - “I Saw Water”
Eli Enis:
For reasons that will soon be revealed to listeners of the Endless Scroll podcast, I was recently forced to listen to a Tigers Jaw album for the first time in what might as well have been a decade. I was there for this band, I listened to all of the other bands in their scene and I’ve had a bunch of friends throughout my life who consider this band to be one of the greatest of their ilk. For years, I just didn’t get it, but now I’ve seen water.
I’ve been playing the Tigers Jaw S/T (the pizza album) on repeat for the last few days and every time it somehow sounds better and more rewarding than the last. It’s really funny to think about now, and for long-time indie-rock fans this might not make any sense, but to my 16-year-old pop-punk-loving ears, this band might as well have been Arcade Fire. They were too *indie* (I.E. they had pianos, they sometimes used acoustic guitars, and their music wasn’t immediately stage-dive-able) for me at the time, and I therefore wrote them off in favor of their immediate peers like Basement, their split-mates in Balance & Composure, and Turnover (I’m talkin’ “Sasha”-era Turnover here, folks — if you know you know). The music those bands were making wasn’t all that different, but it had a grungey and/or post-hardcore-y force to it that spoke more to my sensibilities as a kid whose favorite band was The Wonder Years and whose other favorite band was A Day to Remember. There were dozens of us.
To be honest, and again, this might make some people who think this is the most bleedingly emo shit in the world crinkle their noses, but I felt the same way about Joyce Manor when I was in high-school. I have a distinct memory of reading glowing reviews of their S/T in Alternative Press, excitedly clicking play, and feeling immediately repelled by the vocals that were way more Morrissey than Tom Delonge. What’s crucial to underscore when we talk about The Emo Revival and include bands like Tigers Jaw and Balance & Composure in that discourse (as we should), is that all of that stuff that, then and now, has developed some level of respect and admiration from the indie-rock world (whether that be because of The Hotelier or Oso Oso or Dogleg or whatever other emo band indie-rock people deem OK to like), but it was all just one tiny degree of separation from shit like The Story So Far, Man Overboard and Real Friends (not to mention all of the other even less savory Warped Tour shit) that most Serious Rock Fans wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. If Tigers Jaw came out today then critics would probably say they channel the twee tenderness of the K Records catalog and they’d open for Soccer Mommy. But Tigers Jaw toured with fucking New Found Glory and I will not let that reality be lost to time as stuff like this (rightfully) seeps into the broader indie-rock palette and is eventually regurgitated by 19-year-olds who sign to 4AD in 2027.
As someone who has a fond, nostalgic appreciation for the juvenile pop-punk I thought was so earnestly incredible as a teenager, but find most of it utterly unlistenable and dated as hell today, Tigers Jaw sound so goddamn refreshing and interesting to me now. It has all of the heart-on-sleeve adolescent drama and aching heartbreak that makes emo viscerally special to some and repellent to others, but the songs themselves are actually well-written, compositionally interesting, legitimately catchy and, although clearly written by and for angsty young people, not completely corny or terribly self-serious in the way 18-year-old hardcore dudes are when they write pop-punk songs (looking at basically every other band in this milieu).
Melodically and vocally, I think this shit is soooo influential on Joyce Manor, which I didn’t even pick up on or realize until now, but wow, this is the blueprint. Some of my cohosts seem to find the harmonies on these songs to be….grating, but I think the yawpy, deflated sing-songs are ridiculously charming and addictive. And the line in “I Saw Water” that goes, “But me, well of course I liked you,” is a textbook example of what I think of as emo blank canvassing: dropping a line from the first person that speaks directly to someone in the narrator’s life, but presented without specific context so the listener can snatch it and apply it to whatever love interest they’re thinking about at the time. And every time they repeat the line with that frowny air of resignation, I just feel it in my stomach a little bit more. This shit rules, and although I’m kicking myself for not giving it a proper go earlier in my twenties when I was definitely ready to fall in love with this shit, I’m glad I got there eventually.
The New Pornographers - “War on the East Coast”
Eric Bennett:
Recently, a group of friends, including two of my fellow co-hosts, and I went to a record store. The Attic is a renowned shop here, with a large backroom full of records from bands I forgot existed, and some I forgot I liked. It can be nice, but overwhelming. It’s narrow, brightly lit, and whenever I go I forget everything I’ve been looking for, and just try to find a solitary space. I went through the used bins and came across, and ultimately bought, The New Pornographers’ 2014 record Brill Bruisers. The New Pornographers are a band I got into in college while working my way through a subset of indie rock canon. I had heard their name, and jokes about it, from a friend of my cousin I used to talk about music with, and thought I ought to give them a shot. Brill Bruisers is a rather vibrant record, from its colorful art to its joyful, almost arena rock affectations. It was the first piece of their discography I dove into, and I loved it.
Destroyer’s Dan Bejar wrote and sings “War on the East Coast”, though I didn’t know that then. I hadn’t gotten around to listening to Destroyer — I’m still getting around to it, though I love Ken. It’s also an uncharacteristically synth heavy TNP song, with an unbelievable hook. It’s what Belle & Sebastian’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance wishes it could be. The artists that make up New Pornographers were never afraid of deviating from a sound, and so when they do it feels natural, unlike Stuart Murdoch, whose music sounds like covered in dust (in a good way) finally cleaning things up only to make music that feels inauthentic. “War on the East Coast” is bombastic when it wants to be, at times creepy, and wholly unique within the bands catalog and among the catalogs of the band’s peers.
Mac Miller - “Diablo”
Michael Brooks:
Over the past few years we’ve seen quite a few mixtapes make the leap from sites like DatPiff to streaming services, a process that creates a new set of obstacles for artists and their teams to solve. Last year, Mac Miller’s K.I.D.S. mixtape was made available on streaming services, a full decade after its release, and now you can add Faces, my personal favorite of all of his projects, to that list. Released back in May of 2014, Faces saw the 22-year-old rapper further distancing himself from the frat rap of his commercial breakthrough Blue Slide Park and instead building off of Watching Movies with the Sound Off, which had come out the year prior. This marked a period in time where Mac began to work closely with artists like Thundercat, Vince Staples, and Earl Sweatshirt and his music became a lot weirder (and flat out better) because of it. All fans had to do to check out Faces when it dropped on Mother’s Day in 2014 was make a digital sandwich for Mac, a fun idea masking what ended up being the darkest project of his entire career. Songs like “Angel Dust,” “Happy Birthday,” and “Diablo” helped reintroduce Mac to the world as a “serious artist” in some respects, proving that all of the experimentation on projects like Macadelic and Watching Movies with the Sound Off was only a taste of what was to come.
Unfortunately, “Diablo” faces the same problem that many other mixtape favorites do whenever they head over to streaming—they couldn’t clear the original sample so they had to remake the beat entirely. And to their credit, the remake actually sounds pretty good, albeit there are multiple instances throughout the song where it becomes pretty obvious that it’s not the same beat. However, it’s a small price to pay for making this project more readily available to a younger generation of fans who might not have discovered otherwise. Even without that iconic Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, Mac still delivers some incredible rapping here, name-dropping Petey Pablo in the first verse and firing off bars like “Okay, my mind is Yoda, I'm on Ayatollah / These other rappers just a diet soda” with ease. “Diablo” was quietly uploaded to SoundCloud a whole three months before Faces officially dropped, it’s a song that Mac obviously really liked a lot, and I highly doubt that anybody listening to it for the first time will take issue with this reworked beat. At the end of the day does it even really matter? I don’t think so.