Straylight Run

Prepare to be Wrong

(Victory)

Record Review by Daniel Brody

Mix one part good school system, one part wealthy ennui, and one part boring suburban mall-dotted landscape, and you have the emo ground zero of Long Island, where dozens of bands over-describing their simultaneously mundane and explosive teenage psychodramas have emerged over the past few years to the delight of a weepy cult.  Straylight Run functions as a sort of Kevin Bacon of the scene: vocalist-pianist John Nolan and bassist Shaun Cooper once played in Taking Back Sunday and Nolan also is good friends with Brand New’s Jesse Lacey, although their stormy relationship over such emo topics as cheating girlfriends and cheating girlfriends sometimes spills over into their lyrics.  In such an incestuous scene full of sound-alike bands, Nolan and Cooper felt the need to split apart and pursue a more piano-driven style, and the result is a slight variation on the theme, with some ill-advised experiments going awry.

The EP starts out with “I Don’t Want This Anymore,” sung by pianist and guitarist Michelle Nolan, and it sounds like an attempt at Sigur Ros atmospherics, right down to the breathy vocals, twee electronic beats, and reverberating piano arpeggios.  It begins a pattern where the band tries to break out of its emo guitar prison by emulating other kinds of rock.  But Straylight Run never sheds its emo attitude, and ends up dragging those other styles into a quicksand of whining and self-pity.  “It Never Gets Easier” goes for a Coldplay vibe, and annoys even more than X&Y.  “Hands in the Sky (Big Shot)” is the only song that could pass for Taking Back Sunday, and is, not coincidentally, the single.  But for all its screaming and ugly noises, the music plods, stuck in its pointless despair, crawling towards the six minute mark.  Then the band tops it all off with a pouty piano cover of Bob Dylan’s “With God On Our Side.”  You can barely hear Bob’s sarcastic dismissals amidst the pubescent vocals and windswept sound effects.

It doesn’t matter what sauce you put on the emo; whether it is dominated by sheepish guitars that never fully rock out or pianos that prevent the guitars from being too loud, it is still narcissistic navel-gazing.  This is music for people who waste a lot of time alone on the internet, wondering why they feel so empty, getting lost in their heads full of self-doubt and second guessing.  For emo to flourish, the outside world (i.e. places more than several miles away) needs to be denied existence so that the boring betrayals of everyday life can be magnified to epic scope.  These bands need to get out more.