Common Sage Deliver Gorgeous, Unsettling Emo on ‘It Lives and It Breathes’
Despite its far-from-ideal recording process, Brooklyn-based emo band Common Sage’s new album, It Lives and It Breathes sounds exactly as it should: tense, anxious, and gorgeous. With this record, Common Sage show that they have mastered their craft, and they put together the perfect team to bring their opus to life. They worked with producer Neil Strauch, who has produced for indie acts Joan Of Arc and Owen (consisting of emo forefathers the Kinsella brothers) and many others. Mastering was done by modern punk scenes’ go-to guy in the studio, Will Yip, an experienced producer, engineer, and musician who has put the finishing touches on plenty of incredible records and shows his stripes on this one too. Even the cover art is a perfect fit – a weirdly unsettling image of a person in a raincoat levitating above the shoreline of a beach at night. It comes from Pablo Chaco, who specializes in beautifully haunting art, a visual compliment to music with a similar quality. Each of these contributors brings their special touch to enhance the best part of this whole package, the meat of it – the music itself. Tying it all together, this release is out on No Sleep Records, beloved purveyors of the finest emo.
The titles of this band’s first full-length album, Where are you? I’m in Klamath Falls, are you here?, and their latest EP, Might as Well Eat the Chicken, We Won’t Be Here in the Morning read like inside jokes to emo kids who have scribbled way too many chaotic, wordy, absurd song and album titles onto notebooks and burned CDs. Their 2018 LP is a more raw, bare bones record (with some folky acoustic cuts) that shows their potential, while their 2020 EP hints at the band’s impending growth, an evolution that would come to fruition on this album. It Lives and It Breathes sounds like the band inhaling with new depth, expanding their lungs. And then holding their breath.
By that I mean so much of this album sounds anticipatory, like when you know something is about to go horribly wrong. From the very first track, with its opening line, “Been having the same dream where I burn away, all that I have in hopes of better days”, the album creates an atmosphere that is dark and unsettling. Much of the lyrical content is riddled with anxiety and the music is bound by tension – unrelenting and palpable. And closing track “Sheol” named after a Hebrew word for the underworld, provides no relief. It ponders what may happen to us when we die, ending on the words “I can’t wait to get there”, refusing to resolve the unease as the album’s final sounds ring out in distortion. Around the middle of the record, the ending of “Only Human” holds a rare moment of pure, unbridled sweetness despite yelping vocals that could hardly be considered pretty. But as Julian Rosen shouts, the music soars, sounding triumphant for the first and only time.
Many of the songs on this LP are built around guitar parts with deep tone and hypnotic, addictive melodies, but a few tracks on the backend show that Common Sage are not afraid to switch things up. “In The Back” is an interesting departure that calls back to the acoustic folk tracks of their first album but it carries the same uneasy mood as the rest of this collection, while the following track “An Earthquake” is a blast of chaotic energy that shocks the system after trudging through its predecessor. “Fall Down” instantly brings to mind “Get My Mind Right” from the new Fiddlehead album; both are infectious 3-minute-long bouts of post-hardcore that start with chugging riffs and ringing feedback before getting kicked into high gear, leading up to the catchiest choruses of their respective records.
It is clear that Common Sage synthesize so many of the best traits of their contemporaries, and the final product is like nothing I’ve heard in recent years. If I dared to make a comparison, it would be to former scene heroes, the now disgraced and disbanded Brand New. Given the dark tone, cryptic lyrics, and overall sound and quality of this record, an artful emo masterpiece, this parallel should come as no surprise. This is what it used to feel like listening to a Brand New album. But Common Sage are not Brand New, this is not Science Fiction. This is the new “art-emo” band I’ve been waiting for. And I highly doubt I’m alone in that.
