Album Of The Week: Sorority Noise You’re Not As __ As You Think

Cam Boucher, frontman of the great Connecticut emo band Sorority Noise, also has a hardcore band called Old Grey, and a few months ago, that band released Slow Burn, an absolute gut-ripper of an album. Sonically, Slow Burn was dark and raw and heavy, its quiet moody stretches seguing directly into molten, cathartic howls. Lyrically, it was all about depression and death, expressed in the starkest terms possible. It was the sound of a young man working through some shit. If you didn't speak English and you listened to Sorority Noise's new album You're Not As __ As You Think right after hearing Slow Burn, you might think that Boucher had worked through that shit. Musically, You're Not As __ As You Think is a big, bright, fun album. It has soaring melodies and singalong choruses and a sense of joyous momentum to it. Maybe that hypothetical non-English-speaking listener would hear the new album as some kind of celebration of life after the end of a long and dark period. But that's not what the album is. Instead, You're Not As __ As You Think is just as starkly about death and depression, about missing your dead friends and wondering if you should be among them. It's heavy stuff, even if the music that contains that heavy stuff is as bright and vigorous as any rock album I've heard in recent memory.