Chasing Fridays: Better Lovers, Trace Mountains, Myspace deathcore, and more

Another week, another edition of Chasing Fridays — my weekly roundup of music criticism and gig reviews. After dedicating last week's column to catching up on hardcore, this week I resumed my pluralistic coverage and wrote about indie-rock, power-pop, punk, metalcore, and deathcore. So, a little something for everyone. I'll spare you the loquacious preamble this week and let you get right to reading. But first...

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Team Chino - Promotional Use Only

Team Chino are the solo project-turned band of Hunter Senft, who also plays in the good slowcore band Downward. Sunday Drive Records just signed Team Chino this week, and my interest was piqued by the label comparing this two-song promo to Everclear and Weezer. I've been going through a big Everclear phase lately, and I don't often see that band referenced in press materials, so that got me excited. As it turns out, these songs, "Nerves" and "Beg," do kind of sound like Everclear (chunky, grungey, sad-guy alt-rock) but they also sound a helluva lot like Joyce Manor. "Nerves" in particular has an extremely Barry Johnson-esque vocal delivery, while "Beg"'s hook is a little less Morrissey-tinged and more Southern Californian. Both of these songs are total earworms that succeed in all the ways that a band like Webbed Wing don't. Sweet, peppy, and convincingly twee — but also just a little bit punk. I'm on Team Chino.

Trace Mountains - "In a Dream"

People who've only been reading my writing for a couple of years might not know that NY indie underdogs LVL Up are one of my favorite bands of all time. I'm very sad I won't be attending their reunion shows in Brooklyn this week, but I was lucky enough to see them a couple times during their initial run, and will hold their songs close to me forever. Of the many solo/side-projects that their members have also played in — The Glow, Spirit Was, Cende, Crying — Trace Mountains is one of my favorites. It's the solo band of LVL Up guitarist/singer Dave Benton, and since he evolved out of homemade bedroom-pop with 2018's A Partner to Lean On, Benton's been trying to write songs like "In a Dream." That is, neo-heartland rock in the vein of The War On Drugs, Kurt Vile, Wild Pink, etc.

His 2020 album, Lost in the Country, certainly embraced that twangy sound, and 2021's House of Confusion even moreso, but "In a Dream," the first single from Trace Mountains' forthcoming album, Into the Burning Blue, masters the unwinding epic he's been working toward achieving for many years now. With lavish production from Japanese Breakfast's Craig Hendrix, the song's taut groove and ethereal guitars have more space to breathe than Trace Mountains' music ever has. It sounds expansive and lush, and as the arrangement builds as it careens toward its seven-and-a-half-minute end point, the song begins rivaling the full-band breadth of LVL Up — a sound that Benton hadn't ever been able to replicate in his own solo work. "In a Dream" sounds like a Trace Mountains song, but it also breathes new life into the long-running project. I'm here for it.

Public Opinion - "Drawn From Memory"

Denver's Public Opinion tapped Militarie Gun's Ian Shelton to co-produce their new record, so they know exactly what they're going for here. Posers will call it hardcore, but "Drawn From Memory" just sounds like Superdrag. I love Superdrag, and I love bands who effectively channel that style of gritty power-pop with actual inertia and riffs, and that's exactly what Public Opinion do here. Good chune. Play it loud and jump around while doing so.

Better Lovers - "A White Horse Covered in Blood"

I'm a music journalist who writes about hardcore, so I'm supposed to think this band rules. Welp...sowwy. I don't understand how people listen to a song like "A White Horse Covered in Blood," the first single from their debut album, and think to themselves, "Yeah, this is awesome! This is intense! Devil horns up!" Most members of this band used to play in Every Time I Die, who put out a lot of music I was supposed to like but didn't, and also some really amazing music. Particularly their run of records in the 2010s, when they dropped some of their pointless eccentricities and became more interested in writing compelling songs. Greg Puciato, the singer in Better Lovers, fronted The Dillinger Escape Plan for many years. I don't really like any of that band's music. I recognize their early (pre-Puciato) work as being highly influential on the sound of hardcore and metalcore, but I find their mathy, jazzy freakouts extremely irritating and uninteresting to listen to.

Better Lovers formed last year in the wake of Every Time I Die's break-up and their rise has been undeniable. They were selling out decent sized rooms with just an EP to their name, and I'm sure this album they're gearing up to drop will be a year-end favorite among many people in my general orbit. Not me, though. On this single, Jordan Buckley's twangy, skronky riffs aren't mean or heavy enough to give me the adrenaline jolt that good hardcore/metal riffs do, and Puciato just sounds like he's going through the motions vocally. Oh, he's acting all craAAzzYyy during the verses but siiIIIInnggINgg during the choruses! Except it's neither catchy nor intimidating nor convincingly emotional. Puciato has an objectively impressive voice (particularly his clean singing) and he's a one-of-a-kind performer, but I just think his contributions to Better Lovers' recorded output sound stilted and predictable.

Everything about this band just feels dusty and contrived to me. This is Furnace Fest-core. Hardcore for people in their mid-30s (or older) who still think Converge are running shit. Metalcore for the guy who brings his beer to the edge of the pit and spills it within the first 30 seconds of the set. The favorite new band of that dude you went to shows with in high-school whose family photos clog your feed every time you open Facebook. I'm being a dick, I know. If you like Better Lovers then...cool. But just know that there're literally hundreds of active hardcore bands who I'd rather listen to than Better Lovers. Dozens of active metalcore and deathcore bands who I'd rather listen to than Better Lovers. Not a single note of their music feels exciting or vital to me.

Tracheotomy, Surfaced, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Underneath @ Preserving

Tracheotomy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra are two of the best bands in the ongoing Myspace deathcore revival. What the hell does that mean? Basically, zoomers from the hardcore scene making elemental deathcore that sounds (and looks, art-wise) exactly like what Suicide Silence, Elysia, and Emmure were making in 2007. Like the ongoing old-school metalcore revival and the rise of a slam-metal miscreants Torture within hardcore, this extremely underground deathcore scene is yet another indication of how hardcore is being re-contextualized by young people in the 2020s. The style of deathcore these bands are playing initially spawned adjacent to hardcore scenes in the mid-2000s, but was swiftly subsumed by the metal machine (the big metal labels, the festival circuits, the mainstream metal media) and divorced from its DIY origins, making it lame and corporate in the eyes of hardcore fans by the turn of the 2010s.

Now, it's having a nostalgic revival among young fans who weren't old enough to remember its first wave, and therefore want to remake the long-ago period when deathcore wasn't some shitty, over-produced offshoot of festival metal, and was actually an underground phenomenon that served violent hardcore dancers. That's exactly what this show felt like. Many of Pittsburgh's hardest-moshing zoomers rolled out in vintage Suicide Silence and Emmure shirts, and danced extremely hard during Thus Spoke Zarathustra's set — swinging and spin-kicking just as they did for Pain of Truth last month. The band had a Palestinian flag draped over their amp, gave an impassioned speech decrying Zionism, and then repeatedly shouted "protect trans kids" during their cover of Elysia's anti-homophobe anthem "Incinerate."

It was a more explicitly political set than 95% of the hardcore bands I've seen this decade, and totally unlike any of the red-meat deathcore bands I saw play in the early 2010s. Even if you think deathcore is a musical abomination, you have to give these kids props for reclaiming this genre from washed careerists, lame-ass push-pitters, and socially conservative scrubs. Thus Spoke Zarathustra were the second band on the bill but they should've been the headliner. Surfaced, a hardcore/metalcore/deathcore conglomerate from Louisville, were fine but unoriginal (Thus Spoke were unoriginal but fun), and Tracheotomy felt a little stiff compared to their 'core-mates. Even so, I saw plenty of great spin-kicking, almost zero push-pitting, and no fights throughout the whole night. So that's a "w" show in my book.