Week of 6/30: Emily Haines, Lorna Shore, Icewear Vezzo x Future, Jungheim
Our weekly dose of song reviews. Eric reflects on a classic Emily Haines song, Miranda and Michael recommend new bops, and Eli waxes poetic on deathcore.
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.
Icewear Vezzo x Future — “Tear The Club Up”
Michael Andrew Brooks:
Let’s be real, it was only a matter of time before Future teamed up with somebody from the Michigan rap scene. “Tear The Club Up,” the latest single from Icewear Vezzo following his EP, Rich Off Pints, which dropped only a month ago, is damn good. There’s not much to say about Icewear Vezzo that hasn’t already been said before. He likes his beats sparse and minimal, favoring simple piano melodies that, to be perfectly honest with you, don’t really change all that much from track to track. As an MC, he’s as reliable as they come — he might not always have the flashiest verse on a song but there’s something to be said about how dependable and consistent he is.
But the most exciting thing about this one is watching Future test the waters with the Michigan sound and wouldn’t you know it, he’s a natural fit. He kicks things off by mimicking Icewear Vezzo’s cadence but by the end of the track he’s in his own world, rapping in short bursts and stutters that remind me of the more raw and unpolished stuff he was releasing back in his mixtape days. From the subtle winks and nods to the Three 6 Mafia classic that inspired this song to the possibilities of a continued relationship between the Atlanta and Detroit rap scene, “Tear The Club Up” is a beautiful thing to behold. Whenever I get home from work I’m going to put on a bathrobe and play this song at max volume and I suggest that you do the same.
Jungheim - “The Greatest”
Miranda Reinert:
I got to see some Jungheim songs live back in January or February of 2020 as a part of Nayla’s former Chicago DIY band, Ferret Bueller’s, set. As soon as the band switched around their instruments and I heard her voice I knew it was something special. At the time I compared Jungheim to Seahaven (a reference which did not land and her reaction made me feel older than I’ve ever felt), but with every new project from Jungheim I find more reasons to love her music.
“The Greatest,” track four off her newest EP Songs That Piss Men Off, is built on jangly guitars and scathing lyrics like, “But there’s a part of me that knows that you know / That you are just another leech and your goal is to step over others who deserve it more than you.” As someone who counts the jangly pop of Radiator Hospital and Katie Ellen among my favorite music of all time, I love this song so much. Perfect succinct catchy songwriting. Great production. What could be better than that.
Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton - “Doctor Blind”
Eric Bennett:
While they would go on to release the breakout Fantasies in 2009, and pop up in vaguely alternative media, like their song “Black Sheep” being covered by Brie Larson in Scott Pilgrim, in 2006, Metric had only released their first two records. Live it Out and Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? were full of bouncy punk and punchy hooks, and their bandleader Emily Haines was an immediately recognizable talent. It’s around this time that Haines spun off a side project entitled Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton, its resulting debut album cleverly titled Knives Don’t Have Your Back. I found this project first. While Metric would go on to become one of my favorite bands, I only knew Emily Haines as the voice behind “Anthems For a Seventeen Year Old Girl.” I wonder how many people still mostly know her for that.
When I found this song in 2008, it was through its music video. Slow and surreal, it features Haines wandering through a department store, its fluorescent lights oppressive and familiar. As she steps to the pharmacist's booth, she rifles through her purse and the lights behind the counter go dark. She wanders around the store and finds no one. She looks up to the TV displaying security camera footage and notices someone else behind her on screen. Then, in a fear-induced impulse, shoves the man, setting a domino line of all the store's patrons cascading down one by one. As Haines looks on in horror and the camera cuts uncomfortably close to the visages of the falling, the song's bridge wails. Gorgeous strings accompany the piano that’s been acting as the song's guide thus far, and Haines drops lyricism for some atmospheric da da da das.
The video struck me for its bizarre and simple plot structure, and because the store Haines is in looked nearly identical to my local K-Mart. Naturally, it was what I played on my iPod Nano any time we went there for some time.
Many Metric songs are full of lyrics that sound cool and may hold some meaning, but kinda just sound like a bunch of phrases. The songs on Knives Don’t Have Your Back, from which we get “Doctor Blind,” are comparatively straightforward in their message. Here, we’re hearing her sing broadly about the opioid epidemic. The opening lines try to underscore the irony of doctors overprescribing pain medication leading to them in a sense killing their patients. However, they do so with two sketches that don’t add much - “toothless dentists” and “cops that kill.” The latter idea certainly doesn’t feel all that abstract a concept. It’s chorus cuts to the chase, if one pill doesn’t solve your problems, it’s no worry, we’ll just prescribe you another.
“Doctor Blind” is, for me, one of those songs that act as load-bearing walls. Without it, many facets of my taste would come crashing down in slow motion like the customers perusing Haines’ eerie department store.
Lorna Shore - “To the Hellfire”
Eli Enis:
Now that I work at a metal magazine, I’ve started listening to deathcore again and I’ve become really intrigued by it. As many Endless Scroll listeners are aware due to me periodically outing myself on our podcast, I was full-on in the metalcore/deathcore/post-hardcore trenches between the ages of 15 and 20. I didn’t know what chillwave was or what Frank Ocean sounded like, but I think I could’ve named every member of Winds of Plague. Halfway through my 20th year on this earth I decided I didn’t like any of that shit anymore and got super into indie-rock, hardcore, emo — pretty much any artist who didn’t play Warped Tour was fair game.
Anyways, now, at 26, I’m waaaay past the age of being embarrassed about the fact that I liked that type of music, and I’m even starting to fall in love with some of it all over again. Which brings me to deathcore, a subgenre (metalcore + death metal) that’s always been objectively ridiculous but currently sounds completely fucking insane. By that I mean the bands making deathcore today sound 10x more brutal than the ones who were making it in 2009 or 2015 or whenever the last time you (hopefully at least one reader knows what I’m talking about here) tuned out. If you asked me six months ago I would’ve told you that deathcore was a “dead” genre in the sense that it had reached its creative peak, its commercial popularity, and its trendiness with teenagers, and the major bands who were still around (Whitechapel, Suicide Silence, Carnifex, etc.) were mostly just trudging forward as nostalgia acts.
As presumptive music journalists often are, I was completely wrong. Deathcore isn’t something metal bloggers make rage click articles about anymore, and bands in that scene aren’t cracking the Billboard 200 these days, but like emo in the pre-revival years (before it was deemed Back™), the deathcore scene is very much alive and doing incredibly well as far as niche extreme music scenes go. This band Lorna Shore, who you assumed would be the subject of this blurb (I’ll get there), were a group who played small clubs when I stopped paying attention to deathcore — I had no idea they were still around today. Two weeks back, they dropped a song with their new vocalist after kicking out the last one for sexual misconduct (for myriad reasons, deathcore bands seem to have a really hard time keeping vocalists for the long haul — but that’s another article) and the track has already racked up 1.4m views on YouTube.
For reference, a band I love, The Armed, also participate in a niche heavy music scene, are on a notable label, and got roundtable press accolades for their latest record (including some serious love from Endless Scroll), and the video for “All Futures” that they dropped four months back only has 144k views. Likewise, this band Slaughter to Prevail, who dropped what’s possibly one of the most insane songs I’ve ever heard in any genre one month back, already has 2.7m views. This shit is fucking popular.
And let me be clear here, the music sounds absolutely fucking insane. Recording technology is so significantly better now than it was even in 2010 or 2012 that these bands can sound like genuine alien giants in a way that they simply couldn’t a decade back. Plus, at least for bands like Slaughter to Prevail and Lorna Shore, there seems to be a total lack of pretention in terms of thinking this music is Cool, it’s all about sounding as over-the-top nutty as you possibly can. Which is the way deathcore should be. The Slaughter to Prevail song, “Baba Yaga,” features a video where the members fire bazookas, fight a bear, eat flesh and play a tragic game of Russian roulette (yes, they’re Russian as hell), and the song features one of the most demonic mosh calls I’ve ever heard.
In the Lorna Shore track, the new vocalist legitimately sounds like an actual animal being tortured, squealing and grunting and seething and shrieking and snorting and flailing like an absolute monster in a way that’s just plain funny as fuck and fun as fuck. Sure, deathcore was probably always this campy and insane to people who weren’t 17 when they were getting into it, but coming at it from the perspective of a 26-year-old who doesn’t think it’s literally cool as fuck to dress in mesh Parkway Drive shorts and a Sumerian Records tank top, I have a whole new level of appreciation for the madness.
It really reminds me of where dubstep is currently at. Ten years past its commercial peak, the average dingbat would probably tell you dubstep is dead cause they haven’t heard a Skrillex song in a while, but the scene is very much thriving and production software has gotten so advanced in just a short 5 years that dubstep producers today sound ballistically heavy and intense compared to, like, the Excision mixes from 2010. I think we’re still a few years out from a genuine Deathcore Revival in the way we’re currently experiencing with early 2000s post-hardcore and metalcore, and that makes the music that’s currently being made all the more exciting. Even if you’ve never listened to deathcore before, check out “To the Hellfire” and just let yourself gawk at the absurdity. It’s essentially if F9 or any other transparently unnecessary, cheap thrill action movie was a metal song. It rules.