Apologies to Dad Thighs (conclusive proof that all good band names are now gone, no need to write any more articles on this) for taking 9 months to review this. Pregnancy joke to be made there? No, sorry. Bad material. Anyway. This lil tape comes with a proper lyric zine, like it’s 2002 again. It also came with a handwritten letter. In it they ask for Alex Deller to review this. Shit. You have to make do with me instead of that eloquent bastard. Truly I’m the worst because if it was 2002 I would have listened to this 30 times in one day and written a 4000 word review on the same evening. Instead it’s taken me 9 months and a nasty chest cold, a couple of beers and some lemsip to get to grips with. Also apologies to King Slender who I have similarly let down this year review-wise.
DT have carved out some really delicious emo here, recalling all sorts of bands that I’m less able to draw specific connections to because I stopped using that portion of my brain when we gave up talking about that on CZine forums a few years ago 🙁 I’m gonna go with Lumber Lung. Yep, Lumber Lung. And a bit of Still Life when they got a bit more emo and less hardcore. Also they are from Canada so clearly they are massive fans of Mach Tiver (I can’t even find a single Mach Tiver song on the internet, what a shitty reference to bring up, and it’s probably not true, sorry). Anyway, this is super intense heart on sleeve stuff, the sort of thing that if I had enough get up and go and anyone bought emo records still I’d offer to put out an LP for. But times are hard for emo. However if you are that person who gets all het up about this style and doesn’t feel the need for a physical recreation of that music then listening to these 9 tracks on Bandcamp whilst your curl up in a ball under your desk will do the job just fine. I’m pretty sure there are still a bunch of emo nerds out there who absolutely die for this sort of thing. I’m just twice their age.
This is proper good, and a perfect representation of the sort of emo that can still get a reaction from me. Good work, Dad Thighs (if there is some super emo reason they chose this name then fair enough).