Presented by Get to the Gig Boston / MassConcerts
You Blew It!
with Carly Cosgrove
After Orlando, Florida’s You Blew It released an album called Grow Up, Dude in 2012, it would’ve been standard practice for them to disappear. They’d made a hallmark emo record – a feat that historically guaranteed the end of a project as much as it did its being revered forever. The trend makes sense – this was the sound of bottled youth, a relic from a time after adolescence and before adulthood, unflinchingly earnest and covered in sweat. It was music made for the spaces it occupied – house shows that were all crash cymbals ricocheting off of untreated walls, friends barrelling on top of friends to yell in unison through a blown-out PA. Grow Up, Dude sounded exactly like that, and was arguably one of the best among the genre for it. How could one ever grow beyond these circumstances and expect to retain this magic?
In 2014, You Blew It confidently answered with Keep Doing What You’re Doing. I hit play on “Match & Tinder” and still can’t believe it – they bested themselves with bases loaded. I smile to think of that song’s intro stirring a crowd into a frenzy, the crush of bodies being summoned to the front of the stage, the guitar just before singer Tanner Jones’ first lines come in sounding like a public alarm clock. The band was writing for an audience that reacted inches away, and stepping into high fidelity only broadened and amplified their energy. In a musical moment where genius felt as much a product of blissful naivete as it did calculation, You Blew It showed they could carry a fire beyond their initial spark – and what’s more, so many of their peers were doing the same. The twenty-teens were an era of emo bands communally setting a new precedent, making thoughtful, considered developments all while retaining the vitality that made them so special in the first place.
At the time of its release, I took the title Keep Doing What You’re Doing in the same way I took its predecessor – as an adage handed down from an elder, an acknowledgement of my innocence. Now I hear it echo as a call back from my older self – a self that is listening to this record, charmed and moved to discover it makes me feel more or less the same. “Maybe things aren’t as bad as I let myself believe,” sings Jones on album closer “Better to Best,” and his suspicions were right. It’s something I’m deeply thankful to recognize. I don’t know that I can ever expect to feel that young again, but with these songs and these people gathered in the same room at the same time, I’ll wager I’ve a good chance at feeling ageless.
—- Caleb Cordes