Review: Football, etc. - Disappear EP
By Brittany Oblak, News Editor
[Count Your Lucky Stars; 2015]
Rating: 4/5
Key Tracks: "Sunday," "Open"
Football, etc. seems to fly under the emo scene’s radar as far as garnishing the same amount of attention as certain peers, and that is hard to comprehend. While taking us through tropes and troubles typical to the genre on the EP Disappear, the honesty and urgency building up behind the strong presence of vocalist Lindsay Minton makes you want to follow wherever she is going.
On the opening track “Sunday,” Minton alludes to her coping mechanism of choice when the going gets tough: “Sometimes at night I feel such awful pain / In my knees and my feet / And I just can’t sleep / So I will pretend that my limbs are not there / And they disappear and I am fine again.” It would seem that her mind over matter is geared toward making the unpleasant things plaguing her life disappear. However, despite the flat emotion and near-surrender, the silver lining seems to be the reminder that she can exist in whatever world she needs most at the time. This may also be her strongest message, considering it is likely the source of the project’s name.
“Receiver” comes through chord progressions and fluid guitars peppered with temperate percussion that make up emo’s hallmark, but the theme of removing/avoiding continues on this cut, as Minton reiterates not wanting to answer a certain phone call. However, there is much less optimism than in “Sunday,” as she sings, “She’s sleeping and she’s cold / Like we all be one day” over and over.
“Sweep” continues with the invisibility theme, but in this song we find Minton the victim of abandonment, showcasing her own techniques being used against her. “And I can see right through you / But you can’t see me” speaks to the strange paradox that relationships can operate in. Or perhaps Minton is expressing that she’s been buried to a point where she’s too far gone to be hurt anymore, and it’s given her a certain advantage over her adversary.
“Open,” taking the listener sonically and emotionally through a system of checks and balances, closes the record. Slowly building over delicate string strokes that layer into pressing guitars, Minton declares “Sometimes I’m grateful / Sometimes I’m not … sometimes I am brave / But sometimes I’m not” in repetition until the end of track, in which she intransigently states, “I’m not enough.”
Although I personally don’t subscribe to the “emo revival” because emo never died, there is certainly a movement in the scene. It stars bands such as this one, along with the likes of former collaborators empire! empire! (I was a lonely estate), and draws influence strongly and visibly from ‘90s emo royalty like Rainer Maria, reclaiming the sound for a new generation of fans.
Although only four songs in length, the powerful story told on Disappear shows Minton’s protagonist start out in control, living on her own terms, and slowly takes us, its audience, through the demise of that control and into her being caught in the undertow. Invisibility initially gives her power, but it also ultimately comes back and shuns her. It’s a dynamic everyone has felt but can’t express quite as adequately as this Houston outfit has.
