The San Jose band awakebutstillinbed have succeeded at being so emo that they necessitated a new Bandcamp genre tag. Behold the dawn of “extremo.” Where some bands will preempt the emo label with a kind of self-reflexive joke about it, nothing about the young band’s debut album is played for laughs. You can’t call awakebutstillinbed “melodramatic” because that would imply overstatement or exaggeration, or that drama itself can’t be a resting state. Both “awake but still in bed” and “what people call low self-esteem is really just seeing yourself the way other people see you” are lyrics verbatim from the album and there’s no particular emphasis on either of those lines when they arrive. On average, they’re slightly less acute than anything else that comes from vocalist Shannon Taylor as a coo, a yell, or whatever you want to call the irreplicable moments where it sounds like she’s trying to remove a ball of steel shavings from her throat with a rusty fork. While some albums use a spectrum or rainbow for their emotional palette, low self-esteem needs a fire code: Every moment sounds an alarm, they’re only differentiated by its state of emergency.
This isn’t cinematic music as the term is usually understood, i.e., “lots of strings” or “eight-minute songs.” Rather, it’s a unification of sound and vision, a vivid rendering of a life spent standing on a precipice, where the weight of guilt is somehow the only thing keeping you from jumping. It demands an immediate comparison to the last time a previously unheralded emo band did it this well; “Opener” follows nearly the exact trajectory of the Hotelier’s ”An Introduction to the Album” and low self-esteem shares many of Home, Like NoPlace Is There’s qualities: certainly some of its suburban scenery and themes, but also its brazenly screamed hooks, fitful dynamics, and meticulous sequencing.
But at no point does awakebutstillinbed sound unduly derivative of any band, even if “Safe” and “Saved” are more classic Rainer Maria than the last Rainer Maria album; they’re just drawing from a similar wellspring of emotion. If Taylor’s going to break down at a funeral where she feels somehow responsible, of course it would sound as searching and devastating as “Saved.” Of course a song about freeing oneself from the bondage of patriarchal inheritance would be as feverishly driven as “Fathers.” The full-band plummet of “Opener” hits with seismic impact because what else is supposed to happen when a person just cannot take their depression being invalidated for one more second?
Taylor’s vocals pull most of the focus here, and even when she takes on a more amenable tone, her ability to go nuclear ensures no moment of low self-esteem is passive listening. But she knows when to smash the button, which she does on “Life” before the very first line. Even if it’s couched in one those streaking post-punk arrangements that connect early U2 with Makthaverskan, Taylor’s hook, “I couldn’t get my life back/I couldn’t save myself,” would be notated on sheet music by jamming a pencil straight through the paper.
It’s easy to think of this all as a result of being purely impulsive or serendipitous. That tends to happen in this realm, where even the masterpieces are seen as happening despite themselves: singers who can’t sing hitting the wrong notes just right, guitars chiming in unintuitive yet beautiful harmonies, bands who keep it together for just long enough to create a legacy before they implode six months later. Yet awakebutstillinbed are just freakishly adept at making this creative impulse work for them, especially when these are the first songs they’ve ever released. As the cliche goes, the debut album takes a lifetime to write and the most toxic, profound, and impactful moments were the only ones Taylor saw fit to document. Is it all too much? awakebutstillinbed have a better question: Why would you want anything less?
