Sometimes it's hard to know if something is intentionally evoking the feeling of being a teenager, or if something simply reminds me of my time as a teenager because it sounds similar to the kind of stuff I was into. It was over half my life ago so my read on that sort of thing is fairly skewed now, but the fact that live in pembroke, a possibly live but also possibly not actually live album by shoegazey emo band runaway bride in oslo, has a track titled This is gonna be the best summer ever!, I'm going to assume that this album is intentionally channeling those teenage feelings.
And in that case, I would say it's very successful. Typically when I listen to an album to review it, I take a lot of notes from track to track, and I did do that here too but more out of a sense of curtesy than writing anything actually meaningful. The music worked so much better for me if I just listened to it, if I just felt it.
There are several things that you come to expect when listening to one of these songs. The vocals will be quiet as hell, the guitars will either be noisy as hell or delicately riffy, and there'll often be some sort of spoken word sample at the end. I got really into this rhythm with these songs. The noise, the way it washes over you in all its angsty glory, I live for this shit.
It sounds great, too. Don't let the lofi sound fool you. The guitars create these huge walls of sound, but you can still hear the quiet-as-a-mouse vocals, while the snares punch through. There's so much texture here, a reminder of why despite everything, the electric guitar is the most beautiful instrument.
A few stand outs for me are the gigantic 'See what a piece of eggshell I have found you', the Godspeed-but-emo Homesick in Stratford, and _"We drove home as the sun set over Ottawa Valley", which drops the shoegaze stylings in favour of a lofi singer singer-songwriter piece and it's really lovely.
I don't know if this album was really recorded live. It sometimes sounds like it was and sometimes really doesn't. I don't think it matters, though. What does matter is that it has a youthfulness to it. There are feelings that can only be expressed through music, undescribable feelings that made teenage me fall in love with music in the first place, and I can feel all of that here.
