On March 6, the Illinois Midwest emo artist breathingtechniques released its newest album, titled “i hope youre warm, wherever you are.” Reveling in sadness, this album’s celebration and indulgence in misery is exactly what I look for in a release of this genre, earning it four out of five stars.
The album’s opener, “brown eyes in the sun,” kicks off with anguished, powerful vocals and loud drumming that leaves no moments of silence, filling all space in the song. Compared to past releases, such as “autumn 23,” this was much more intense. In this track, I noted the absence of twinkly guitars, a Midwest emo phenomenon that I would characterize as having a clean, bright guitar tone and quickly played melodies. This phenomenon has been central to breathingtechniques’ music in the past.
The guitars appear in the next track, “mike kinsella and i have the same birthday.” In this song, the guitar tone and vocals come together to create a muddy feeling, evoking moodiness, while the second guitar — the twinkly one — cuts through the sludge and gives listeners something to focus on.
A repeated feature of many tracks across the album, something I also noticed in my favorite song off the album, “dont look at me,” was the use of overlapping recordings in the vocals, often one speaking while the other screams. It contributes to the somewhat psychedelic, distant feeling the album evokes.
In the minimalist “this feeling wont last,” an extremely simple riff opens the song and repeats throughout with no accompanying vocals, giving listeners a moment of respite from the characteristically whiny vocals associated with Midwest emo. It sounded like an unofficial interlude, which I appreciated as a lapse within the album that helps the intensity of other tracks stand out. The song “betray your memory,” which comes later in the album, plays a similar role in moderating the intensity throughout the album, although it’s not quite as minimalistic. breathingtechniques does a good job of pacing and spreading out the intensity of the songs on this album, keeping listeners engaged.
“it will always be you” also belongs to this category of softer songs; it takes dreaminess to another level with heavy use of synthesizer and effects. I have a hard time staying in the music I’m listening to if it’s too homogenous, and I found that using these slower, relatively relaxed tracks in between the more fierce songs, such as “brown eyes in the sun” and “highway mental breakdown,” where the strong vocals and drumming fill every moment, kept me on my toes as a listener.
I also found the variation in acoustics and guitar tones across the album interesting. Although the polyrhythms that are found in pretty much every track still gives breathingtechniques a distinct style, the tone varied from muddy to clear and twinkly, and some tracks were heavily electronic, namely “it will always be you,” whereas others were entirely acoustic similar to the album’s closer, “killer eyes.” This similarly keeps listeners wondering what’s next.
In many ways, “i hope youre warm, wherever you are” is a quintessential contemporary Midwest emo album. The screaming and whining vocals that evoke the singer’s suffering have now become one of the so-bad-that-it’s-good hallmarks of Midwest emo cherished by the genre’s loyal fans. Similarly typical of Midwest emo, this album features polyrhythmic guitars, almost forcedly quirky titles, many of which have more words than can be counted on one hand and samples, often exaggeratedly tragic. Some samples found on this album are Dr. Wilson tearfully asking Dr. House to comfort him from “House” (2004-2012) in “grab my face and tell me everything will be okay” and a part of Patrick Bateman’s monologue in the “American Psycho” (2000) business card scene in “life is like a box of chocolates, i hate chocolates.” These are all characteristics that fans of contemporary Midwest emo, myself included, have come to expect from the genre.
This degree of predictability, potentially more of a flaw of the genre rather than the album, is why I didn’t give this album 5 stars. However, it gets 4 stars because, despite this, “i hope youre warm, wherever you are” is Midwest emo done well. I felt the heartbreak, loneliness, desperation, hopelessness — whatever you call it — that the singer was trying to convey, and I was pulled into the album entirely; the repeating polyrhythms have a psychedelic way of sucking listeners in, and once you’re in it, the peaks and troughs of intensity keep you in all the way through this short album’s 19 minute duration.
