While Midwest emo may have originated in Middle America during the genre’s late-’90s heyday, it eventually found a home on the coasts. Much like Seattle’s Sunny Day Real Estate and Philadelphia’s Algernon Cadwallader fit into a scene thousands of miles from its epicenter, the band Double Grave gracefully adopted the sensibilities of the late 2010s Northeastern slowcore revival from their home state of Minnesota. On the trio’s second record, Goodbye, Nowhere!, themes of vast physical and metaphorical emptiness provide a backdrop to songs that sullenly grapple with getting older and trying to remedy the pitfalls of adolescence in the rear-view. It holds up alongside distorted post-shoegaze classics but stays true to its chilly northern roots.
Goodbye, Nowhere! Came to life during a period of personal growth and self-imposed solitude for lead singer Jeremy Warden when he and his bandmate-turned-fiancée Bree Meyer took a break from living together for the first time in a decade. Lead single “The Farm” deals with the predictability of recurring desolation, and “Long Drive Home” confronts the difficulty of trying to open one’s heart in a world where stoniness is an essential trait. The lyrics about feeling like pure garbage and its fuzzed-out whammy guitar initially sound like a soundtrack to getting home from school and throwing down one’s backpack in a huff. But the mysticism in the album’s fascination with death and alienation shows that Warden is, in fact, reflecting candidly about the grim realities of transitioning into “real adulthood.”
Goodbye, Nowhere! has strong intentions and great musicianship, but its production value is frustratingly mid-fidelity. It exists in a lackluster middle ground that sounds like the demo of any hard-working but unremarkable bar band playing in the scene of a small city. It sounds cheap, but it never feels thrifty. It’s why the album can play like a New England “type beat.” Having opened for bands like LVL UP and Pile, Double Grave roam in the same sphere as many of the indie rock bands that came before them, and their music at times feels like a derivative of the artists they have shared stages with. While hazy indie is an easily classifiable genre, the best artists within its niche aren’t those that simply duplicate the doomy Duster-style jamming that Double Grave can totter into. The record’s more percussive instrumentals, like “Slime,” play like every song on Ovlov’s first record Am mashed into one.
All this is more or less the byproduct of a band coming into their own sound, an invisible process akin to the worries of aging Warden touches on throughout. The sorrow that churns through the album feels dramatic and forlorn, but the neurosis in Warden’s songwriting gives the record heart. “Hard times keep coming down on me/I don’t know where I went wrong/I try to be cool and friendly/But nobody wants me/Nobody cares,” Warden sings on the stripped-down closing track “Too Late.” This kind of snow-dusted misery throughout Goodbye, Nowhere! is what makes the best slowcore records stand out in an oversaturated scene.
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