In honor of Further Seems Forever’s new album as a reunited band, Penny Black, I thought I’d post a review I did of their first album, The Moon Is Down.
I wrote it in early January of 2010, as part of the top albums of the 2000’s, for Buzzgrinder. The site is down but I was able to grab it with Google’s wonderful caching functionality.
At the time the review was something of mine I actually liked, especially since I’m not really the record review kind of guy. Reading back on it, though, there are some things in there I wouldn’t type today. Weird how a few years changes things.
Partnering with releases belonging to their scene’s peers — like Thursday’s Full Collapse — The Moon Is Down bridged the crucial gap between the feet-shuffling self-effacement of ’90s emo and the power-pop emo that would come after and propel the genre’s three letter appellation into mainstream, household use. The band — essentially Strongarm with a different vocalist (the singy-note kind) — and their debut full-length with the strange pink and white color scheme, acted as a stabilizing fulcrum that kind of kept either side of the seesaw from knocking everyone’s Buddy Holly glasses off.
Over a rolling bed of chord voicings — heretofore unused in indie rock circles — and drummer Steve Kleisath’s creative, trickster skin work, then-unknown vocalist Chris Carrabba wailed in his almost-falsetto about romance found dead or gettin’ dissed by once-good friends. So it seems, anyway; one can’t exactly tell.
There was an overhanging theme of alienation brought about by physical separation: a recurring rite of passage that bookended the college experience (Carrabba joined the band just shy of his quarter-century mark). His attempts to reconcile romance and friendships with incompatible geographies borderlined on the obsessive. To him, time may have healed all wounds, but distance ripped them back open. Travel was his savior.
His word choice and delivery were neither too forlorn nor too saccharine (a delicate balance that he obliterated, in my opinion, in Dashboard Confessional), but it was sufficiently sincere enough to make it attractive and unspecific to just about anyone yawning from all the screaming metal bands.
From the power waltz 3/4 of the opening title track to the jazz-slide seagull guitar of the album’s closer, “A New Desert Life,” the Colbert/Dominguez/Neptune signature songwriting is writ large. Further Seems Forever converted droves of hardcore kids into their kinda-sorta Christianized denomination of amalgamated emo and rock. For those still unfaithful to FSF, try listening to Carrabba’s optimism and the guitars’ hopeful echoing in the last half minute of “Snowbirds and Townies,” and feel your doubt drain away. I know it still gives me the shivers.