emo

The story so far is on the record, and it isn’t pretty. Mike Kinsella’s divorce, his drinking, Steve Lamos walking away for two years: LP4 puts all of it on the table.

Opener “Man Overboard” begins with a stuttering 7/4 drum pattern and soft vocalising, Kinsella resigned to his fate. “No Feeling” carries the mood: ‘Tell the doctors I’m done / The kids, “Adieu” / And mother, “Désolé”’. By “Blood On My Blood” the story of his life is in disarray. Three songs in, it’s clear Mike is struggling.

His voice has changed since LP1. More expressive, less one-dimensional. What was a constraint 25 years ago is now the thing that makes him worth listening to.

The lyrical themes peak on “Bad Moons”, the teenaged feelings of the debut firmly in the rear-view. This is a record about the difficulty of middle age. The kids of LP1 are divorced dads now.

The band keeps up its recent habit of using guests sparingly. Brendan Yates, Caithlin De Marrais and Wisp appear as backing vocalists, adding texture rather than rewriting the songs.

A record full of gut punches, then. Sonically it’s a leap over LPs 1–3, less in style than in execution: the twinkly, expansive sound is intact, the synths and strings improve everything without announcing themselves, and the arrangements are lusher than the band has managed before.

Put your headphones on for this one. Mike might not be alright, but the record is.

Troubadour is a record of genres in conversation. Sag uses on a melodic phrase that briefly nods at Smashing Pumpkins’ Today before settling into something that’s part alt-country, part emo. Other tracks lean folk, country, shoegaze, post-hardcore. None of this is the maximalist everything-at-once approach; the genres are deployed song by song, deliberately, with the range emerging across the album rather than crammed into individual tracks. Singer Brendan Wright calls it “farm emo”, which is both funny and accurate.

It’s a breakup album, but a quiet one. The lyrics circle reflection rather than recrimination, even when the music goes loud. If you want a single comparison, it’s Uncle Tupelo plus Modest Mouse—the alt-country sturdiness of one, the restless dynamics of the other.

Moab and Redwood are the standouts. Both let the band’s range surface inside a single song without losing the deliberate per-track approach that defines the rest of the record.

Sean Solomon spent the better part of a decade fronting Moaning on Sub Pop before that band wound down, and went back to making animated videos for Run the Jewels and Unknown Mortal Orchestra in the quieter stretch that followed. The World Is Not Good Enough is his first solo record, on ANTI-, and it sounds like a record made by someone who took the long way round to it.

Hushed, melodic, personal; “Postcard” is the standout and “Black Hole” is the most honest: “I’m afraid if I have children / I might pass this sadness on”. Coping mechanisms, fears named rather than dodged.