13th Draft - Where Do We Go From Here...?

I really shouldn’t like 13th Draft, but I do. Emo is pretty much its third strike after metalcore, but I find this Polish band’s debut EP oddly listenable. Mostly, it’s because the singer has a strange stubbornness to soldier on with screams even when choruses beg for the requisite clean singing. There are some clean vocals, and they aren’t bad, but they’re brief and in such unusual places that I can’t help but think, “Oh, those crazy kids!” As I get older, it becomes ever-weirder to hear music for which I am so obviously not the target audience.

That said, the teenager in me digs this stuff with only a small degree of shame. It’s not necessarily bad for music to be “emotional,” nor is it necessarily bad that it’s overtly so. Besides, there’s enough metal and dissonance here to appease my grown-up side (that bridge in “Fallout” is so like Rush’s “YYZ”). Energetic performances, silly arrangements, and Lifeline’s trademark amazing digipak-aging – where do we go from here, indeed. You can find this EP at Interpunk.