Me and Him Call It Us - Loss (2006)Vulnerability is gestured at in metalcore more than it is exhibited. The introduction of singing to the genre was seen, by and large, as an overstepping of boundaries, the “pussification” of a style whose parent components--both metal and hardcore--have long codified stoic masculinity. Although it became something of a hallmark of the genre, clean singing is more often utilized as a means of approximating emotion rather than as a genuine expression of it, and so the quality of vulnerability it heralded for the genre has become both a cliche and a trope--a tool in the box, not the product itself. You wouldn’t expect Me and Him Call It Us to be vanguards of progress. The duo gained prominence, back in the day, through “grassroots” MySpace promotion and a sound that seems like your typical two-tone mathcore: one-half sloppy grinding, one-half noise. There is, of course, more shading to Loss’s palette, although these descriptions are superficially apt--Me and Him Call It Us are competent musicians and sometimes excellent songwriters, but in the spirit of their (pre-MySpace) emo/screamo forebears, are more likely to give a passionate performance than a technically-precise one. Their production is standard-issue for a Myspace band; average at best, but primarily just adequate. Against the odds, these elements lend the record color and highlight its throughline of anxiety, which manifests in startling ways: the way vocalist Blake Connolly chokes on his own voice in the midst of “Cut-Throat Cardiac Arrest,” the borderline-pathetic weeping on the title-track, lends the record an unpredictability that even their contemporaries in Destroyer Destroyer and See You Next Tuesday can't match. Me and Him Call It Us are willing to show emotion in an emotionless genre. Vulnerability is their secret weapon. Like similar records from the era, from Nuclear, Sad, Nuclear to Our Puzzling Encounters Considered to Behold the Fuck Thunder, the record’s jaggedness makes it both a thrilling and unsettling listen, each lightning-flash twist approximating the jump-scare tactics of a horror movie (a relationship further buttressed by the record’s production qualities--there's an inexhaustible charm to creativity on a tight budget), but it’s the rare mathcore record, let alone one plucked from the rotten garden of “MySpace grind,” that sounds just as terrified as it is terrifying. Aaron Womack, on drums, is responsible for keeping Loss coherent, but also for its messiness. He sometimes sounds as if he’s in a hurry to leave, although it’s more likely that Me and Him Call It Us were rushing to capitalize on the success of their demos and The (C:) Drive of Loves Stories. Connolly, on guitar, abuses panic chords and dissonance sometimes to Loss’s detriment, but his skill and conviction are hard to deny. Whatever logic binds Connolly’s vivid, frightened vocals to his spasming, shrieking riffs seems nearly spontaneous, and doesn’t reveal itself easily, even over repeat listens. Reprieve comes with atypical frequency, strengthening Loss’s mood of psychological horror through contrast: the back-to-back “Into Troubled Waters, I Sink” and “Headache,” along with “The Sea Swallowed Us Whole,” emulate the weirder bits of Calculating Infinity, as any of these tracks could have been amputated from “Weekend Sex Change” or regrown from parts of “*#..”. “Headache,” by its very nature, may remind Premonitions of War fans of Left In Kowloon’s “Cables Hum Overhead,” since both songs disrupt their respective records with forays into noise, and are seemingly engineered to test patience; they would seem to work better tacked-on after the last track, or left off the record entirely. But, for my money, “Headache” is more necessary to Loss than “Cables Hum Overhead” is to Left In Kowloon; there is more precedent, established right off the bat with “Sarsparilla” and furthered with the well-named “The Anticipation Is Killing Me,” so its headfirst plunge into the record’s latent undertow of madness is earned. “Headache” rises organically out of the anxiety-jazz of “Troubled Waters,” losing the percussive spine of that song (hardly there, anyway) as it opts instead for ebbing breakers of static and and waves of pedal-skronk. I’s the nightmare sequence of Loss’s horror movie. “Innocent Bystanders Watched in Horror as Peter Jennings Drew His Murder Weapon” reestablishes order with the record’s least-forgiving composition, hosting a breakdown that sounds as if Womack and Connolly decided to wage war on each other with their instruments--and this, only to throw us for a loop two tracks later with “Loss,” which as mentioned, verges on the pathetic with its wept vocals and out-of-whack instrumentation. This is where the tension between the record’s violence and insecurity breaks. In isolation, it’s a mess, but in the context of Loss, the result is cathartic in a way truly not seen among bands of this ilk, for whom the opportunity to play in inscrutable meters and irreverent of musical convention is seized mainly for humor or for irreverence sake. Me and Him Call It Us recognized the complement between the unpredictability of the genre and the unpredictability of, well, loss; and although the song does not fare well on its own merits, the cumulative experience of Loss as a statement is the mathcore equivalent to what Korn did with “Daddy.” Over time, Me and Him Call It Us have exerted a quiet influence on their branch of the metalcore tree: .gif from God, for example, although overshadowed on their most high-profile release by Vein’s side of the Self-Destruct split, name Me and Him Call It Us a direct influence, and it’s not hard to hear. I doubt the band ever expected to have such a legacy. But more intriguing, given their meteoric rise and current prominence in hardcore and metalcore circles, is the interest Knocked Loose have shown in this obscure little band. They recently covered “Innocent Bystanders...”--or at least the breakdown--following a live rendition of an as-yet-unknown song off their forthcoming album. For a moment, let’s table this homage and its implication that we may be hearing a little Me and Him Call It Us seeping into one of modern metalcore’s biggest bands and examine Knocked Loose. It would be tough to call them vulnerable; we’ll never hear a clean-sung note out Bryan Garris, and it’s probably a safe bet we’ll never hear an acoustic note on a Knocked Loose record, either. What we can expect is for the band to continue eroding the tougher-than-thou culture surrounding the style of aggressive metalcore they play--not in their music, but just outside of it. In interviews, on camera, and in person, Knocked Loose don’t pretend for a second that they’re anything but kids with a passion for heavy music. They aren’t tough-guys, thugs, or “hard,” and they wouldn't try to pass themselves off as any of these things, either. They are genuine, and they are having fun; this, I think, is what Keith Buckley of Every Time I Die recognized when he Tweeted that there was “something special” about Knocked Loose. A lack of pretension is their secret weapon. Like Me and Him Call It Us, Knocked Loose play by the rules of their genre while covertly dismantling the expected behaviors and culture of the scene. For a band of their frankly staggering popularity to look nonjudgmentally back on the MySpace era of the genre, to recognize their place on a continuum and pay homage to their genre's many unsung champions is big, and bodes well for both Knocked Loose and for the unfairly dismissed era to which Me and Him Call It Us belong. They were ahead of the curve, but they were not alone; and if they can be rediscovered and reevaluated as important visionaries, there are surely more from where they came. -Brian L.
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