Emo and its tangential offshoots have long been a love of mine (as anyone who has been reading my thoughts on music over the past year and a half have known), and As Cities Burn is one of those deep cut albums which has long cemented itself as a cult-classic personal favorite. There’s a bit of a history lesson in emo/post-hardcore that I think Son I Loved You At Your Darkest follows as it relates to some of my biggest musical influences in the genre– that of commercially successful vs. art-rock bands. A perfect example of this is the career trajectories of Taking Back Sunday and Brand New, two Long Island powerhouse outfits in the early 2000’s that have both common musical lineages along with personal drama (we’ll tell the story of “Seventy Times Seven” and “There’s No ‘I’ In Team” another day). But effectively Taking Back Sunday and Brand New went in two different directions as their careers progressed– Taking Back Sunday effectively went mainstream with really well manicured pop songs (that absolutely rock, make no doubt), while Brand New took a turn into more artistic endeavors once they released The Devil & God Are Raging Inside Me. Every time I listen to As Cities Burn I draw parallels between them and another brutally ferocious post-hardcore band Underoath which I loved. Whereas Underoath tilted their sonic direction towards the pursuit of the screamo hook, As Cities Burn tended to explore the more raw, unfiltered, and artistic side of the genre. The fact they were both Christian metalcore groups signed to Tooth & Nail Records cements this even more in retrospect and helps to tie them both together.
And that’s what has always stuck with me when I pop on Son I Loved You At Your Darkest. There’s so much life within this album once you peer underneath the heavily distorted guitars and heavily processed screaming vocals. Whether it be the heartbreaking autobiographical tale of an absentee drug-addicted father in “The Widow” (which legitimately sends shivers up my arm every time the moment lead singer Cody Bonnette sings “My mother’s heart breaks like the water inside of her”) to the absolute mayhem that unfolds on “Admission:Regret” in all its sonic dissonance, this album is an ode to the beauty that can be found within pain and heartbreak. It feels like a neverending search for meaning which never comes to resolution, and like any everlasting piece of work, leaves you with deeper questions about the meaning of life that stick with you long after it’s done.
Standout Songs: “Thus From My Lips, By Yours, My Sin Is Purged”, “Bloodsucker Pt. II”, “The Widow”, “Admission:Regret”, “Of Want And Misery: The Nothing That Kills”
