Labels: No Idea Records
Review by: Andy Malcolm
Ah, I Hate Myself. One of the rare breed. The pure emo band. Untainted by rock stardom seeking, corporate blandness, or screamo chaos. I Hate Myself had a very honest style through out their life time. They cried a lot, they wrote lyrics that kill you, yet saved your life in the same instant, they had music that took on the aging emo style, and filled it with new energy.
This minimally packaged, bronze see-thru 7″ offers up one of their finest songs to date, the breath taking “Drama In The Emergency Room”. A song that charges the listener with the emo groove so adeptly, that reaches heart crushing screams, that scrapes a long the floor at such a melancholy pace to almost resemble the mighty Boilermaker. Only for it to bound into window leaping hardcore that bruises to leave you as a tattered corpse, fallen on the pavement below – “I… I can’t survive, but I don’t know… if I want to”. Emo. As. Fuck. Anyway, the cruelly over-looked Don Martin 3 would be proud of this song, such is the Florida emo legacy ripping your heart apart from your speakers.
I Hate Myself offer so many options. For the desperate, they provide solace, these lyrics will feel worse than you ever have done before. For the alcoholic, IHM will offer more incentive than ever to drink yourself into oblivion. For the clinically depressed, they speak your mind. Though it all becomes clear with the final written words”¦ “Don’t kill yourself. You can no doubt think up something more constructive” and their final song, “Darren’s Roof”, appropriately taking their heart stopping sadness to a new beginning of optimism (IHM is now Burnman)”¦ fuck it, if every thing is bad, it can’t go on forever. And rarely did I find so much in a lyric as “If I talk and I laugh too loud, it’s cause I’m trying to forget I’m sad, because things can get pretty bad, but I’d like to believe that somewhere I’ll find someone who’s going nowhere and we’ll go there together”.
They never meant for you to die. RIP, IHM.