Dear You

I've heard great things about Jawbreaker! To be honest with you I was tuning the album out until Accident Prone came on, what a corker of a song! I was hoping this would be a turning point for the album - and in a way it was - by leaning into that noisy and shoegazing sound a bit more, but unfortunately it wasn't enough to sway my opinion.

Dear You is post-hardcore and punk flavoured alt rock, as well as having strong emo influences. Personally I find it a little too tame. It's not bad by any means, but aside from a few key parts that breakaway from the typical sound (such as the wonderful Accident Prone) it sounds very vanilla. The band excels a lot more when they get into the weeds of emo music.

Husker Du's influence on alt, punk, and emo is well noted, but I think Dear You is the closest I've seen to a band following their script so closely. I don't mean that as an insult as I think Jawbreaker adapted it to the sounds of the mid 90s extremely well. In fact you can go a step further, and hear the blueprint for a lot of the pop punk and emo bands that dominated the mid 00s, such as Blink-182, on this record. Despite my concerns about the quality of the record, it's fascinating in terms of punk lineage.

Someone in discord informed me about a "selling out" controversy that the band had, I know that a lot of bands associated with the punk scene in the early 90s were foolishly accused of this, and I think I hear this as this as this band seems like they could go harder but feel a bit watered down. Maybe it's just because I had the wonderful Witness by Modern Life is War yesterday, which was exactly my kind of emo punk, but I'll have to check out earlier Jawbreaker records to confirm this.

Should it be in the main list: I was originally going to say no, but after thinking about it I think it does belong on the list. You can hear the development of a lot of genres and bands from 1995 to the end of the emo pop/punk era in this.

Top 3 songs: Accident Prone, Jet Black, Sluttering (May 4th)

Kovaa skeittariajoa ysäriltä! Tykkäsin.

At what point will people start agreeing that there's enough of this kind of thing on here now

I've accidentally listened to this twice now and the only thing that's really stood out has been the Christopher Walken quotes. The band are just kind of boring.

3.5

An album

By the end of the album I really enjoyed this, top 90s alt rock.