Bivouac
Jawbreaker
1992
I like this album because it's catchy in the roughest, loudest way that music can possibly be while still accurately being described as "catchy." But the album is important because of the genre it helped to establish without even meaning to, and thus acts as a guidepost in my lifelong pursuit of "understanding music." So it goes with this column—there's what we have at face value, and there's what it means in a bigger context, and there's the tension between the two, comprehended in real time each week as I sit down to type out the requisite 300 words or so.
The former theme, the "hey, this is really good, check it out!", can be accomplished less through words and more so by you clicking on the embedded album at the bottom of this blog post. But if I needed to type out some words about it anyway, I usually say "what this sounds like." But that's the whole thing with shit like this—doesn't really sound like anything that came before it. Hence the "this should be a whole genre" discussion that takes place afterward. If I had to name bands as some sort of RIYL exercise, then I could probably say something like "if the lead singer of Rancid became the lead singer of blink-182," or maybe "has the energy and shape of the Replacements' loudest songs," both of which are so reductive that it's almost embarrassing. If you're gonna be asking anyone about this, then PoYB contributor Gilson is probably your guy, based on the little preview of this album that I got this past January.
Every week, I hope the classic Blind Spot album that pops up for this column is a "good" album, enjoyable to listen to, and Bivouac absolutely is that. But ultimately, that's never why I'm here, and so it's never a requirement, per se. It would even be okay if it was an average album but I was able to see the bigger picture through it. Jawbreaker did both, and that's great, but at the end of the day, I'm happier that I understand emo music a little more now that I've listened to it, and thus understand music in general just a tiny bit more than I did yesterday.
The former theme, the "hey, this is really good, check it out!", can be accomplished less through words and more so by you clicking on the embedded album at the bottom of this blog post. But if I needed to type out some words about it anyway, I usually say "what this sounds like." But that's the whole thing with shit like this—doesn't really sound like anything that came before it. Hence the "this should be a whole genre" discussion that takes place afterward. If I had to name bands as some sort of RIYL exercise, then I could probably say something like "if the lead singer of Rancid became the lead singer of blink-182," or maybe "has the energy and shape of the Replacements' loudest songs," both of which are so reductive that it's almost embarrassing. If you're gonna be asking anyone about this, then PoYB contributor Gilson is probably your guy, based on the little preview of this album that I got this past January.
Every week, I hope the classic Blind Spot album that pops up for this column is a "good" album, enjoyable to listen to, and Bivouac absolutely is that. But ultimately, that's never why I'm here, and so it's never a requirement, per se. It would even be okay if it was an average album but I was able to see the bigger picture through it. Jawbreaker did both, and that's great, but at the end of the day, I'm happier that I understand emo music a little more now that I've listened to it, and thus understand music in general just a tiny bit more than I did yesterday.
I don't see Jawbreaker listed in too many "first-wave emo bands" lists, probably because the first wave is usually specifically defined as bands that came from the '80s hardcore scene in D.C., and Jawbreaker ain't that. But if you expand the definition, and just say that the first-wave bands took hardcore music and made something completely different within the same sonic framework, then Jawbreaker slots in pretty easily.
The association with hardcore music is the reason that I'm sometimes reluctant to dive into certified first-wave bands. But the need to confront my discomfort and know this music and appreciate it is what caused me to choose Bivouac out of the Jawbreaker discography and not, say, Dear You, which by most accounts is a superior album, but has a cleaner sound both due to production value from the "sell-out" major-label move and the fact that Blake Schwarzenbach got a polyp removed from his vocal cords. I'll get around to the album eventually. However, the blind spot for me today wasn't so much Jawbreaker as much as it was a first-wave emo band that I'm always hearing so much about, and this seemed to fit the bill better. I'm glad I'm here.
The first waves are always the most interesting, because neither the bands nor the audience even realize that they are in the wave until after the fact. You're almost tempted to attach the "proto-" prefix to the genre, since the concept was new, and especially in this case, when first-wave bands fought against the label of "emo" so voraciously. But time is kind to genre specifiers, and over three decades later, it seems like it's not a mortal sin anymore to consider Jawbreaker an emo band. And since emo is my favorite genre now, but partially because it's so deep and so unknown and so mysterious, I'd say overall that Jawbreaker feels like my kinda band.
The first waves are always the most interesting, because neither the bands nor the audience even realize that they are in the wave until after the fact. You're almost tempted to attach the "proto-" prefix to the genre, since the concept was new, and especially in this case, when first-wave bands fought against the label of "emo" so voraciously. But time is kind to genre specifiers, and over three decades later, it seems like it's not a mortal sin anymore to consider Jawbreaker an emo band. And since emo is my favorite genre now, but partially because it's so deep and so unknown and so mysterious, I'd say overall that Jawbreaker feels like my kinda band.
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