Anil Gets Sad Over a La Dispute Album

Emo season is here

Ok, I know I talked last week about how Fall is death metal season, but its also obviously emo season so I’ve been listening to a lot of La Dispute and Touché Amoré (who are dropping a new album this week!). In particular, I’ve been going back to La Dispute’s 2014 album Rooms of the House a lot as its always felt like the perfect fall album to me since I first listened to it several years ago. The band has been doing some 10 year anniversary shows for the album this Fall and I’m insanely disappointed I wasn’t able to make it out to catch one of those shows, soooooo now I feel some obligation to ramble about the album.

La Dispute have to be one of my favorite bands playing this particular brand of post-hardcore with a heavy emphasis on emotional storytelling and dynamic songwriting, and I think Rooms of the House is still a holy grail in the genre 10 years after its release. The album follows a loose, non-linear story about a couple’s deteriorating relationship, with an emphasis on the house they live in. The album also includes three songs with years in the titles that vocalist/lyricist Jordan Dreyer has referred to as “historical fiction,” which get away from the main couple and instead tell stories about people in Dreyer’s family. The album as a whole ultimately follows this main idea of physical objects and spaces retaining the memories and history forged around them, which I thought was really interesting as someone who is very sentimental and horrible with getting rid of things.

As you can probably guess by now, a big reason the album is so good is its lyrics. Dreyer’s writing is so vivid that it makes you feel like you’re in the room with these characters, like a ghost wandering the halls of this house and watching as these characters live out their days. You could pick literally any song from the album to showcase this, but the two that stand out the most to me are “Woman (in mirror)” and “Woman (reading),” which are companion pieces that reflect on the mundane moments in the main character’s relationship, with the former looking back on the earlier days of the relationship and the latter reflecting on its end. These songs really encapsulate that idea of feeling like you’re in the house, Dreyer’s writing is just so powerful that its impossible not to get sucked into the world this album creates and be able to visualize everything being described. “Woman (reading)” has several lines in the back half of the song that really capture the main theme of the album, with lyrics like “When you leave here / When you go from a home / You take all that you own / But the memories echo,” and later ending the song with the lines “I live alone now / Save for the echoes.” Hearing the song in context near the end of the album makes these lyrics hit super hard, especially with everything happening musically underneath the lyrics.

The songwriting throughout the album is incredibly dynamic, with the band flowing between heavier, more aggressive sections and sections that are softer and feel more intimate with their atmosphere. “Woman (reading)” is probably the best example of a song that nails both of these vibes on the album, with the song starting off with a more minimalist approach that gradually builds in density, adding more activity to guitar lines as well as introducing entirely new textural layers like a very subtle trumpet line. This all leads into the song exploding into this mess of emotions, with the band playing more aggressively and Dreyer’s vocal delivery morphing from the almost monotone spoken-word delivery he uses in the first half of the song into this more frustrated yelling that makes the lyrics hit even harder.

Another personal favorite on the album is the song “First Reactions After Falling Through the Ice.” This is one of the more “straight forward” tracks on the album, being one of the most energetic tracks and featuring something closer to a traditional “verse-chorus” structure. The song has this really cool 5/4 groove that I think compliments the lyrics really nicely. The song uses this image of walking over a frozen lake and falling through the ice as a metaphor for the dissolution of the main character’s relationship and an inability to move on from it, and the song being in 5/4 instead of 4/4 creates this feeling of trying to hold onto something as long as possible before it slips away, and of hesitation to let go of something. I have no idea if that was intentional on the band’s part, but either way I think it works very well.

One last song I wanna talk about is the album’s closing track, “Objects in Space.” This is one of the more intimate songs on the album, with a very minimalist musical approach to let the lyrics, delivered by Dreyer in his spoken-word style, shine. The song follows the main character going through the house and finding things from the relationship to pack away, letting those objects pull him through time until finally packing them away in boxes. This song really highlights how strong Will Yip’s production is on the album, as this song is just dripping with atmosphere the whole way through. Yip does a great job at making such a minimalist song like this feel so full of life, and his production is another huge reason why this album (and every other album he’s worked on, really) can feel so immersive.

I’ve always been bad at getting rid of things because I associate almost everything I own with some memory, so this album always hits super hard for me. I think its really cool that we all have things that we’ve carried for years that have kind of absorbed our experiences like a sponge. I can go over to my bookshelf and grab one of the little knick-knacks I hold there and get flooded with specific memories, I can even get the same thing with something smaller like the keychains I use. The idea that the rooms we live in are given life by our presence, and that they will continue to be given life by the people who live here after us and create this sort of shared history is really beautiful to me.

ANYWAYS I don’t really know why I felt like getting sappy on the blog today but there we go. Next week’s post will probably be about pandas or my crippling addiction to 100-hour RPGs. Have a great weekend, everyone!!