Album Of The Week: Sorority Noise Joy, Departed

This is a horribly reductive statement, and it includes a whole pile of classic exceptions, but I'm going to make it anyway: Emo, for the long duration of its commercial peak, was an entire genre made up of dudes who were sad and who blamed that sadness on the girls who'd broken up with them and/or cheated on them. There's a great Jessica Hopper Punk Planet piece from that era about how the entire scene, through lyrics and actions, denied women their agency even though every fucking song was about women. What had started out as an optimistic genre -- a way out of the rigorous rut of hardcore pummel, a new avenue for self-expression -- had become a repository for the sort of dumped-chump heart-baring that belonged on LiveJournal rather than in song. What's most interesting about Joy, Departed, the sophomore album from the Connecticut band Sorority Noise, is the way it flirts with that old viewpoint while ultimately transcending it. There's a lot of breakup talk on Joy, Departed, and a light sprinkling of how-could-you-do-this-to-me blame-talk. But the album ultimately isn't about that. It's about addiction and manic depression, about realizing that you need to address the things you've got going on in your own head before you can even think about sharing your life with another person. Frontman Cameron Boucher is never really in accusatory ex-boyfriend mode, though he does spend some time longing for someone who he's not going to have. But when self-help-book verbiage starts creeping into his lyrics, his voice takes on a whole new urgency. He's singing from the perspective of someone who's damaged and -- here's a key distinction -- who knows he's damaged. That level of insight, combined with some seriously great keyed-up pop-punk hookery, makes Joy, Departed the best thing I've heard from the so-called emo-revival since that became a music-press buzz-term a couple of years ago.