The Saddest Landscape - You Will Not Survive

The Sad­dest Land­scape
You Will Not Sur­vive
Panic; 2010

Talk about your neg­a­tive, ugly con­no­ta­tions – any­time I hear the word “screamo” tossed about as a descrip­tor for a band’s music, it con­jures up images of teenagers shop­ping for stud­ded belts, eye­liner, and mass-​marketed goth-​lite para­pher­na­lia at a Hot Topic. For­give me for such gross gen­er­al­iza­tions, but as some­one who lived through the early ‘00s with the rise of Thurs­day, The Used, and bands of that ilk, I am famil­iar with the bands and musi­cal styles that con­tinue to be in vogue on the Vans Warped Tour cir­cuit. So, when I ini­tially read the press release that described The Sad­dest Land­scape as “screamo,” I was quite dubi­ous, but as You Will Not Sur­vive careened into and assailed my sense, my fears were quickly swept aside and promptly replaced with excel­lent music.

This out­stand­ing seven-​song record kicks the pasty-​white, skinny ass of your quin­tes­sen­tial Hot Topic-​approved band all over the musi­cal play­ground. Post-​hardcore tex­tures and post-​punk thrash are com­bined with brood­ing, haunt­ing angst to cre­ate big swirls of pow­er­ful noise. The gui­tars snarl and tromp about with sharp, glinty edges, while the drum­mer stokes the fire with his furi­ous tom-​pounding and resound­ing cym­bal crashes.

The real thrust of the record is in the lyrics and how Andy Mad­dox sings them. The songs drip with the famil­iar melan­choly of dreams dashed, loves lost, and lives fucked up, but there are these slight twinges of sur­vival that slip past the anger and frus­tra­tion. On “Torn, Bro­ken, Beau­ti­ful,” we hear how, “We pray for mem­ory lapses, the strength to for­give and for­get while we are speak­ing in absolutes, but still noth­ing has changed.” With “Eter­nity Is Lost On The Dying,” Mad­dox pas­sion­ately intones, “We are des­per­ate kids doing extra­or­di­nary things, and we are just like you.” And my heart nearly breaks on “Imper­fect But Ours” when Mad­dox cries out, “And after all this time I have learned that all those wishes led to was bad deci­sions and fail­ure, but you are the one thing that I got right.”

The Sad­dest Land­scape stands up tall as the abject oppo­site of what you’d expect from some mewl­ing bunch of whin­ers liv­ing in a post-​My Chem­i­cal Romance musi­cal land­scape. The band’s music whole­heart­edly puts the emo back into emo­tional, com­plete with all the hurt, pain, and anguish that first cat­e­go­rized the genre. You Will Not Sur­vive is bold, relent­less, and uncom­pro­mis­ing, even as it dis­plays the frus­tra­tion inher­ent with liv­ing in the pre­car­i­ous shades of grey that define human­ity in the 21^st cen­tury. If this is what screamo sounds like in 2010, then I want more of it – lots more.