Excuse me, who are you? I hear it a lot. For example, when I helpfully attempt to add additional orders of french fries to strangers' orders at drive-throughs, or when employees at pet supply retailers discover that I've MacGyvered my way into the cat adoption area to give all my future fur children imprisoned there a pat on the head, and always and inevitably, when I'm discovered by a member of the housekeeping staff to be impersonating a sports journalist to get a comped executive suite and a crate of grapefruits to myself while tumbling through Nevada.* However, I've never heard the phrase in a moment of bliss that didn't involve me risking arrest, or at the very least, an uneasy confrontation... that is until now: Out of Madison Wisconsin, bellows and cries a group that certainly is no stranger to the eccentricities and nonconforming pleasures that make life worth the wages and weight of alienation, immeasurable Sisyphean toil, and the manifold of intolerances that all too often dictates its terms. Excuse Me Who Are You probably don't endorse me scamming hotels while pretending to cover dirt-buggy bolts across the Majove, but I fully endorse their understatedly gallant, glitteringly gut-wrenching and thoroughly delightful album Double Bind- a post-hardcore cast cascade of bright and sharply flexing chords, winding grooves that spin and splunk like a bowling ball rolling through an Escher print while dragging a splattering ream of ink soaked dairy passages behind it, and shout-sung vocals that bare their fangs like a bellicose wolf before the moon as a trumpeter of lost and lonely agitation in an unfeeling and unsympathetic world. EMWAY is a band that very clearly takes their performance and the subject matter of their songs as seriously as a chemical dependency, without losing sight of the fact that the music they're making is meant to be fun- many of the tracks include amusing cutaways and scrapped soundbites, while titled range from text emojis to ironic musings on the slippery divide between death and sleep, with the most diverting (literally) being the web address to the official page celebrating Mima of Perfect Blue- a roll of the tragic waggishness that impresses upon the fact that the emotive, psychological, and digital acquire a concreteness in our experience that is as real as the foundation of wood, stone and steal beneath our feet and an acknowledgment of the ephemeral fluids of our digital selves as they bleed into the cold heart of meat space. While they're certainly capable of raising a reflective ruckus on their own, the group is not alone in conjuring these missives of clever catharsis and cutting inquiry, being helped to attain ebullient new heights with the 8-bit aid of Hey, Ily, and learn to practice an uncommon subtly of softness and certainty in collaboration with fellow Wisconsinites Tiny Voices (just to name a few of the guest features on the album). Unwind your sorrow and put some slack in the line; exercise the ghosts and guilt that tie this Double Bind.
