Spirit Desire
Photo Cred 📷 : @rafsantosphotography
I’m hesitant to call anything 5th wave emo. I’m unashamed to admit that I don’t think I fully understand the qualifiers in a competent enough way to ascribe the much discussed (and frequently maligned) genre tag to anything. Some bands will self-describe with a wink and a nod, others will dodge every comparison like they’re stray geese rife with bloodlust. All the same, Emo is in its most interesting place yet, and I find myself wondering about it all within the multi-genre marriage and divorce of Spirit Desire’s “No One Makes Me Laugh as Hard As You”.
Feedback in to fuzzy guitars always bring a tear to my eye and have me reaching for my Big Kids records, as “The Sweater Song, Part 2: Even Sweatier” is both bouncy and punk as fuck with echoing vocals that sing and lilt into pogo inducing pop chords. Saccharine and coated with sardonic bemusement, “A Streetcar Named Spirit Desire”, sonically plays homage to Tennessee Williams, shifting through 3 acts. Docile bass strums thumb slowly alongside soft-hand drumming as a lamenting croon of Why’d I have to run into you? / Why’d I have to run into you? floats before picking up at a clip, bursting into frenzied yet infectiously catchy instrumentation, with a strained yet elegant closing act of moody guitarwork. The variety the band provides to its compositions keeps me turning back to this album over and over again.
From acoustic self-contained aria “Pelmo Crescent”, to the melodic and fuzzy folk yell of “Loveliness (Bug Song)” (don’t think that we missed that Simple Plan callback in there), nestled up against “Shy Guys” a moving track that sounds like if Hum wrote their version of a waltz, the album paces itself quite excellently. My personal favorite is the openly somber but insanely lush “Grange Park Lawn Darts” with its stuttering and heart fluttering buildups, like words caught in your throat, finally uttered with demure surrender: We will never have a home / Above the basement / Couldn’t move out / Even if we tried / Aren’t you so tired? A line as frigid as a creeping Canajun fall breeze, snuffing that light in your heart to grow the pit in your stomach. The sparkling acoustic, “Bro, We Did It” melds into the fuzzy and tender racket of “Good Riddance!!!” before pitching headlong into the gorgeous textures and very heavy genuine bummer that is “Adventures”
Final song “Tombstoned” is frenetic, as shrieking vocals undulate against panicked percussives and viscous ghost-in-chains basslines. Languishing in the sarcophagal nature of depression, flashbacks of a filthy room and despondent living were all brought in front of me again in an all too real way. This album is ever shifting, with its form unknowable but expressing an energy that is easily perceived. A matchup of anxiety, longing, and defeat all set to catchy, gut-wrenching, bleary eyed instrumentation and vocals, Spirit Desire easily gives sound and motion to our most entrenched internal struggles and poetically enshrines the failed connections we barely manage to survive and even the ones we don’t.
The swell of emotion that this album finds and communicates at regular intervals is enough to conjure aching nostalgia and listlessness, while making it an absolute pleasure to experience. “No One Makes Me Laugh as Hard As You” has easily become one of my favorite releases this year and is in strong contention for album of the year in my book. 5th wave or not, we impatiently await Spirit Desire’s next move and look forward to whatever they bring us next.
Check out their Bandcamp here : Spirit Desire
Writer : @letsgetpivotal
Editor : @just_reidz
11/28/22
