“Take something you love and run into the ground a thousand times.“
The revival scene when it comes to deathcore and metalcore has been bountiful, with acts such as Balmora, Tracheotomy, and Long Goodbye bringing a near-perfect performance of the genre’s roots and perhaps producing the best representation of each genre. However, melodic hardcore has not seen such a revival, despite widespread love for some of the genre’s sweetheart bands. Outside of a few acts including HEAVYHEX and Take Hold, it has been few a far between of acts who deliver on that strain of melodic hardcore. The sweetheart bands of this microgenre, such as More Than Life and Defeater, did such a good job that melodic hardcore feels like a lost art.
The latest to throw their hat into the ring is a New England act, Love Letter, which features members of the aforementioned Defeater and Verse. Their debut records comes in the form of a full-length titled Everyone Wants Something Beautiful. It’s found a steady foothold in terms of appeal, but still doesn’t perhaps fully capture the magic the genre once had.
The opening stretch of Everyone Wants Something Beautiful has an immediate impact. Opener “New Anthemic” has the emotiveness that the likes of Worthwhile struck, as vocalist Quinn Murphy yells “I can’t hold, I can’t love you, I can’t look you in the eye anymore” with a sheer anguish. The trading of vocals between Murphy and Jay Maas on “Wellness Checks and Dead Friends” throws the mind back to when Maas did it on Defeater records such as Letters Home and Empty Days & Sleepless Nights. He repeats the strength of these performances for Love Letter.
It does begin to feel like a perfect ode to the heyday of melodic hardcore, yet it does hit a divergence when it comes to “Popular Memes“. The track takes aim at the batshit nature of the alt-right, which isn’t disagreeable, yet having the mention of Turning Point USA screamed into the ear gives the same feeling as when one of their awful clips curses your social media feed, which is maybe not what you’d want from record.
Following tracks “Unhousing Projects” and “Settlements” address political manners in a much more pertinent and touching manner. The former touching on the scourge of homelessness, as the track painfully laments “A life worth more than fake smiles and misery“. It’s here that the instrumental work from is worth a mention, the guitars from Maas and Spence measure the pace of each track with a graceful but harsh manner, while the grooves and fills from Reitz compliment these perfectly. This is only affirmed as “Unhousing Projects” bursts into its closing moments while Murphy screams “There’s only violence here“.
The aforementioned “Settlements” might be the moment that many take away from Everyone Wants Something Beautiful. A paced a pertinent track putting forward the narrative of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and how Western governments are forced to comply. As “An impossible world to love” is yelled as the track closes itself out, it’s a lyric that reminds of when Broken Vow screamed “I hate this fucking world, I’d do anything to change it“, a sense of wanting change against the impossibility of it all.
Everyone Wants Something Beautiful quickly throws itself back into the mixer on “Meds“, giving little moment to digest the past few tracks, where perhaps an interlude would have been appreciated. The latter half of the record does struggle to get out of this, as both “Debilitating Self Doubt And The Will To Use It” and “Late Stage Harm Reduction” sonically don’t have the ability to draw the ears full attention. While both solid tracks, it’s a sense of perhaps a lack of variety when it comes to how both are written from what has come before.
As “Panic Disordinary” moves in to close out the record, Love Letter move in with one of their best performances of the record. Packed with some sublime guitar work, whether it’s the glistening plucked guitars against the strummed chords, or the explosive riffs that Defeater offered up.
While not wanting to get too meta, it would seem that Love Letter have shown their hand in their own name. Not wanting to be a revival act or reinvention of the melodic hardcore genre, each member has chosen to piece together a record that pays ode to a genre, even if it’s original magic cannot be re-created. All while, they’ve used their record to put narrative and commentary on political issues that need a voice. What Love Letter have done here is commendable and the project surely has a bright future.
7.5/10
Everyone Wants Something Beautiful is out June 28th via Iodine Records, and can be pre-ordered here.