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In case the news is still under wraps, Braid is coming out with a new album, Desaperecidos played a couple reunion shows a while back and the apocryphal Cap'n Jazz reemerged here in Austin last fall like a beautiful herpe received from your childhood love, swelling up after nearly a decade of dormancy. Looks like the brash distorted throngs of emotive punk have resurfaced once again. The savior of music and mankind alike? I think so.




There's tons of deliciously noodley independent bands emerging from everywhere: from their midwestern tornado shelters and basements, from behind their mountainous piles of second hand records, from the UK, the throngs of twinkly indie bands seem endless. Pennsylvania provides the subtle nostalgia of Algernon Cadwallader as well as Snowing, a band with all the uppity energy of your first high school party with all the genuine lyricism of the note found in your locker that monday. There's Empire! Empire! (I Was A Lonely Estate) from Michigan, Joie De Vivre from Illinois, a band now defunct, unfortunately, Monument from D.C. and This Town Needs Guns from Oxford in England. Though they may be bountiful, they are quite the ambiguous creatures. There's a couple record labels that can pinpoint some of the greats but there's going to be some serious scrounging for those honestly interested in the search.




Count Your Lucky Stars records and Topshelf records are a couple of the meccas, Topshelf actually providing two of this years FFFF hardcore acts Touche Amore and Defeater (and I'm not talking about the shitty Warped Tour brand hardcore either, folks. I'm talking something more akin to1985 Rev Summer hardcore).




In an age where the term "emo" has come to describe any and every band that writes songs about anything ever, it's nice to see some of the old aesthetics, stylings and sincerity of the bands the term described once, eons ago, resurfacing in growing popularity.