Do you know the story of Vampire Weekend? They’re titans of the indie scene now, relatively well-respected and commercially successful, symbols of an album-loving past that has been long abandoned. They were pretty hated for their aesthetic at first! Well, should they have been? The aesthetic itself was based around the idea of authenticity and how VW challenged said idea. The quartet met at Columbia University, a goddamn Ivy League, and they wrote and sang songs about stuff you would probably expect someone like Ezra Koenig to write and sing about: playful references to real-life friends, cryptic references to literature, influences from African music, and, most polarizing of all, class relations! The band wore the collegiate prep aesthetic on their sleeves, and the indie scene ridiculed them for it (also the subject of ridicule: Pitchfork gave their first two albums some REALLY positive reviews), all because the band was authentic, or at least pretended to be authentic. What was the real issue, though? VW were cleverly commenting on their class relationships and various intersectional ideas that were conveyed through their music and subject matter (quoting “Taxi Cab”: “I could blame it on your mother’s hair / Or the colors that your father wears”), and the indie scene at large were disgusted with such perceived pompousness, pretentiousness, et cetera. 

Why should I bring them up, especially since their sound is so far removed from emo it’s hard to see the relevance? I believe VW are an example of authenticity in the indie-sphere and how that sort of authenticity could be “dangerous” to employ in a scene full of nerdy folks who reject any sort of vulnerability (for various reasons) because it would reveal some uncomfortable truths. Dejected irony is the key to the youth, always has been (see Pavement’s attitude on Slanted and Enchanted); it is also the folly of the youth, always has been (quoting R.E.M. 's “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”: “You said that irony was the shackles of youth / Uh-huh”), but we won’t really know that until it’s too late. We must stay young forever, and growing up means either confronting these emotions or burying them deep, deep, deep inside to conform to a society that has no room for any vulnerability. What was the original point I was making?

Mom Jeans. sucks. I don’t think I’m making any friends saying this but it’s not a groundbreaking idea, either. They have one album that has broken through to the emo revival-obsessed audience congregating on TikTok, that’s the album I listened to, and that’s the music I disliked. My favorite music is stuff that does not seem to correlate to the sound of this album, and I am very, very snooty when it comes to discussing the type of music I enjoy, which tends to be warmer, noisier, rawer, more personal, et cetera. The band are probably very, very nice people, with goals and ambitions and families like you and me, but the art they produce is simply, for lack of a better term, slop created before the whole TikTok emo revival thing happened. It predicted the derivative sound of early-mid 2020s emo that would get popular on TikTok (and most of it didn’t, because it sounded too much like the better old stuff that REALLY got popular) and it’s so relatively short and sweet you would’ve thought the band purposefully crafted their debut album Best Buds to be entirely streamable through TikToks. It predicted a lot of things, like the annoying song titles that would plague modern emo (“Vape Nation” is probably my least favorite), the stupid, stupid, stupid emo vocals that have somehow been made worse over the course of emo’s lifespan (to think we’ve gone from Guy Picciotto on “For Want Of” to this Mordecai-sounding wannabe), and the even worse production! Its guitar sounds so goddamn clean. 

I think THAT’S the main issue with this album: for what it wants to be, this really emotionally vulnerable midwest emo pastiche, it sounds way too clean, squeaky-clean, even, to actually evoke some semblance of real emotion. Nothing sticks because it all sounds the same, and every individual instrument either overpowers the other in the mix (those cymbals especially, gosh) or is completely absent (hello bass, or goodbye bass, I guess). The arrangements themselves are nothing special either! It’s cookie-cutter Midwest Emo, down to the way the guitar sounds, which is vaguely twinkly, occasionally evocative of something, but mostly just aesthetically pleasing and antiseptic. It’s like the band heard American Football’s debut and ignored everything except the guitar tones of the prettier parts of “Never Meant.” Lemme put it this way: the album feels like a particularly spotless and white quartz floor in the lobby of a bank. It doesn’t matter that it’s clean because it’s the quartz floor of a bank. It would be way more interesting and evocative if it was made of, I dunno, pure gravel or had a smidge of dirt somewhere? Though that wouldn’t make the bank interesting either–nothing surrounding the instrumental even provides some interesting or at least baffling quality that I could grasp to excuse that absolutely awful drum sound. I REALLY hate when the drums sound like that (I call it the “AC/DC Drum Sound”), like the skins are being hit with drumsticks in an expensive studio rather than percussion being played or something NATURAL! Did that make sense? For example, I’m showing my emo bias here, but listen to the drums on something like “For Want Of”, or, for a more contemporary example, “January 24” by I Hate Sex, where the drums are recorded in such a way that they’re in the background of the song and not overpowering literally everything + in such a way that they sound like they’re PART of the song, a natural component of the sound. The cymbals on Best Buds clash with literally everything and make the arrangements sound so useless. Even the vocals, the ones that are infamously whiny are at the forefront of the layering of this thing. Speaking of, MAN are those vocals really terrible. The whole trend of people saying midwest emo has terrible vocalists is mildly annoying at best and downright offensive at worst (I may be taking this too personally) and I am afraid this album is the origin of that stereotype. These vocals are utterly horrible. They are not horrible in a campy way, they are not horrible in a “so-bad-it’s-good” way, not horrible in a believably emotional way, they are just bad. Whiny, not in tune at all, and straight up just fake-sounding, which isn’t to say that good music can’t be made by people who have these qualities: one of my favorite records of all time is the Brave Little Abacus’s Just Got Back From the Discomfort, an album that’s filled to the brim with possibly the worst singing on a purely technical standpoint. However, as I’ll get to later, it’s believable, serves a purpose in the greater scheme of the music at hand, and most of all his voice is raw and harsh–vocals that perfectly encapsulate the content of what lead vocalist Adam Demirjian was singing about and what he was singing against. 

The production on this record is easily the worst part of the entire affair, and you can see its biggest flaws in Eric Butler’s vocals, lack of bass, over-bearing drums and guitars (so…everything, lol). There’s no space for anything to breathe, and while that may appeal to some people, I find it supremely sickening and so evocative of what Rick Rubin was doing on the infamously awful-sounding Californication and the end product of the loudness war™. It’s as if the cotton candy you were eating was entirely made of caramel! Oh my GOODNESS it just sounds so bad! And it could’ve been entirely avoided somehow! If the mix was just somehow sparser, more low-fidelity, rawer, even, this could’ve been a passable attempt at approximating what the band The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die were doing a few years earlier. Alas! Does their sucking correlate with some sort of inauthenticity? Not completely–Best Buds is something that sounds completely soulless, completely fabricated by corporate overlords to appeal to a profitable audience, scientifically crafted to be a hit emo album, and evokes nothing to challenge the listener in any way. Best Buds channels all of the worst stereotypes of Midwest Emo into one 30-something minute long sludge that feels unrewarding to dive into…it’s Midwest Emo for people who hate Midwest Emo, is what I’m saying.

However, to say that this album is soulless is missing the entire point of the record and this band in general. It’s vulnerable music, for better or for worse, and it comes from places of true emotion, true stories that people have gone through. The issue is that it doesn’t come off as believable, right? The voice feels like it’s pandering to the masses, but at the same time it’s definitely a guy screaming out (moreso yelling, but I digress) his emotions at full volume, with some appropriately corny, adolescent lyrics and stupid song titles. That’s where the VW comparison comes in: did Ezra Koenig’s vocals really sound like he felt what he was saying? Yes, I think, and so does Eric Butler’s voice, in distinctive ways. Yet, one is seen as an example of authenticity or emotional rawness (though not by a larger public) and the other a wanna-be pariah or prep-school gangster (if you know, you know) who wanted to capitalize on the nerds’ hip tastes. They both operate in completely different circles of music, sure, but the idea is still there: what makes something authentic and what doesn’t? In short, I believe it’s the production–as David Byrne said once about lyrics, “People ignore them half of the time.” If something is super clean and antiseptic it’s perceived as inauthentic, whereas a low-fidelity recording is seen as something from the heart: see something like the perception of The Moldy Peaches vs. The Mountain Goats, for instance. The Peaches are what I call “fake lo-fi”, lo-fi music made in lo-fi for the sake of it rather than for a genuine artistic purpose (or at least that’s what it seems like to me, keep in mind I don’t quite enjoy their music), whereas John Darnielle literally recorded his stuff on a boombox with just him and a guitar before he got the funds for a full backing band later on. They both also sing about different things, with the Peaches being more humorous, sarcastic, and irony-poisoned, and Darnielle being way more focused, somber, pastoral, introspective, and poetic. The tact and taste in the choice of production, songwriting, and vocals displayed by both artists make their separate cases for authenticity.

Which leads into my bigger problem with this band, and this reaches out to other modern emo bands too (Title Fight and Joyce Manor come to mind): a lot of young people’s perception of the genre of midwest emo stems from a sort of detached irony, not claiming a true emotional allegiance to the genre in fear of ridicule. This is what I meant with my “Midwest Emo for people who hate Midwest Emo” comment that closed off the review section of this piece: the music that Mom Jeans produces is made so carefully that it inadvertently removes any embarrassing elements about it. What could’ve been an embarrassingly relatable album became a commodity for people to claim that they relate to without having any emotional consequences to this relation. The aesthetic itself feels commodified, referencing contemporary pop culture for the sake of quirkiness (“Scott Pilgrim vs. My GPA” your crimes will be punished) but the effort ends up something of a sad reference that dates it severely…at the same time, though, it can be seen as a monument constructed by young folks who did not know any better to not date their record with references to stuff from their era, and as an optimist, I like to see it this way (despite what I’ve been rambling about, I don’t actually hate this band). It’s a little confusing, and criticizing this album’s incessant want to relate feels a little mean, but it’s been bothering me personally for too long. It’s safe music, for people who don’t want any edge in what they do from their day-to-day lives. That in and of itself is fine, I guess; to not want danger is a very natural instinct, isn’t it? Then again, to not challenge yourself is to conform and to lose your own identity in an ocean of people just like you, who possibly don’t have anything for themselves…I think I’m getting a little too harsh and hyperbolic here, but the point has been made: it’s smooth and goes down TOO easy, which is everything the emo genre should NOT be, in my opinion. 

It’s frustrating to see how people begin to engage so detached from emotion when it comes to enjoying this type of music. Their enjoyment HAS to be publicly ironic, or it becomes a point of ridicule and, therefore, humiliation. The solution to avoid humiliation is to pretend your enjoyment and taste are jokes so you don’t get hurt, but that, in turn, hurts your own personal growth, and it downplays the importance of your own emotions in the expression of those emotions. This lack of authenticity then breeds more inauthenticity in the music you consume because you would like to relate to the music you listen to so you listen to music made with progressively diminishing authenticity and a severe lack of sincerity and you post about it for validation and all your irony-poisoned friends enjoy it too and then and then and then and then and then…to what end? And maybe that’s why Mom Jeans is so popular, because it appeals to people who have detached themselves so much emotionally that it’s almost unhealthy, and lyrics like “Because I’m so sad / Whenever you’re not here’” are so vague/blunt and are delivered with plausibly deniable “sad”/”passionate” vocals they appeal to everybody while remaining completely impersonal–simulataneously, these lines are delivered with such a uniquely awkward conviction one could successfully identify these lines as either jokes or completely sincere statements of emotion…ugh. I hate to be so dichotomous in my writing but it’s true: this album is both completely vulnerable and completely shallow/dispassionate. To have them be the poster boys of the genre…a little sad, both that fact and how much I care about it. “It’s not that deep”, as people say, but y’know, everything might as well be or nothing might as well be. I’m not a philosophy major by any means, but I can’t help but feel like caring too much about something like this is a sign of actual emotion, passion, stuff like that. We need to look too deeply into stuff sometimes, within reason, of course. 

Am I being mean-spritied with this? Maybe, but that wasn’t really my intention. All this is to say: you shouldn’t be afraid to tell others the type of music you like, or to enjoy the music you do enjoy, or let people tell you how to enjoy something…same goes the other way: don’t tell others how to enjoy music and don’t bash others for the music they listen to (within reason, of course). I’m just very opinionated, and sometimes those opinions are so strong I write about them. I had to balance out my positivity somehow. “Guilty pleasure” is a made-up term that defines nothing in reality, and you should know that. Be a fan of Midwest Emo and defend their so-called “awful” vocals! Listen to Best Buds and make your best memories with that record! Spin it as much as you want, it’s not up to me! But have some edge! Don’t live your life in a dull way! Be sincere in the face of distress and disingenuity! Music is only truly “awful” if you don’t try, and this genre has a LOT of triers…like the honorable Michael Stipe said, “Irony is the shackles of youth.” Uh-huh. The album still sucks, though.

(F+, ‘Edward 40Hands’)