Of Someday Shambles
(Big Wheel)
This Australian quartet’s music will be familiar to fans of bands like Jets to Brazil, Jawbreaker and The Get Up Kids, who were on an emo-package-tour that went across the USA this year. That’s the good news. The bad news is that most of said music is a little too-familiar and a little too drawn out and a little too-lacking in the lyrical department.
The best songs on Of Someday Shambles, like “Please Leave”, have polished hooks, the guitars ring like guitars should, but ironically, the thing that undermines many of the tunes---and by extension, the entire disc---is a lack of passion. For a group working with the tools of emo-core, that’s a pretty serious problem to have. Even when Jeb decides to get angry and lay into one, as they do on “Happier Sad”, they end up more concered with sounding emotional than actually expressing any true and lasting emotion. Even taken at face value, the lyrics run into the same problem: Jebediah are plenty concerned with heart-rending personal to and fro, but they can’t seem to put that across in their composistions. And everyone knows, if you are having trouble saying something, taking longer to do it isn’t gonna help, and most of this disc swamps whatever forward momentum it has under needless repetition of choruses and verses.
And after all, when you take the emo out of emo-core, you’re left with core. And that is Of Someday Shambles: the listener is left holding an apple that’s already been eaten. How good is that?
Stinkweeds, 2000
