Algernon Cadwallader - Some Kind Of Cadwallader

I bought this CD at the fifth-best concert I’ve ever been to. In order, the best ones so far have been the So Many Dynamos breakup show, the Moms breakup show, Ugly Blondes/Tough Cuffs/Grant Charney at the Funhouse, Hammered Hulls/Skull Practitioners at TV Eye, and then Joyce Manor/Algernon Cadwallader/The Ergs at Brooklyn Steel last year. I got to flail and scream about how much I love kissing swamp creatures with a couple hundred New York dorks and overall had a blast. It also got me thinking about emo revival as a singles genre.

Sure, there are some great emo revival records out there that stand alone as works of art (Home Like Noplace Is There, The Albatross, Holy Ghost) but at the show, I felt the energy shift palpably when Algernon played the hits. The revival of 90s emo sounds in the 10s underground is inextricable from the rise of streaming. The discovery robot favors one or two songs from a record in its algorithm. So, naturally, the first two songs of this record pull focus.

“Casual Discussion in A Dome Between Two Temples” starts with what feels like a lyrical mission statement for the record - “Haiku-like imagination/Big bright buddha adjust the station”. These guys are going with the flow, even if the flow is frothy and goofy. The guitar is a river rapid here, with complex lines built around simple chords. The drums drive the song from the subtle start to the tambourine-shaken verse, to the waltzing build and the release of tension into the start of the title track. And what is this nimble, bittersweet song about? Chatting with the bros at a party.

“Some Kind of Cadwallader” is more conventionally structured. Two verses, two choruses, an outro. It’s so bouncy, it’s almost as if the band is feeling the rhythm in 1|4 rather than 4|4. The guitars hammer on and off with two hands, but they also slide notes and groove in a way that feels much more rock and roll than almost any other song on the album. And again - while the vibe is what we now know as emo, the contents are much more oblique, four leaf clovers on a mountain top, punch stains at prom. “Oh man, it’s taking me over” - what is taking him over? It’s metatextual. The energy of the band, the crowd screaming the lyrics back to them. That’s the trigger for their overwhelming emotions. Algernon Cadwallader was one of several east coast bands to turn the sonics of broken hearts in college towns into the party rock we know today.

Let me stop here and beat a dead horse. I know that this particular dead horse has been pounded into a meat slurry on the side of the road, but if there were a casual music listener who had the lyric sheet in front of her, would the word “emo” ever pop into her head? Or a jazz cat, or a hip-hop head, or even a devotee of another subgenre of rock. Would “emo” stick to this album naturally, if not for the scene these guys immersed themselves in, and the people who’ve referenced it? The biggest point of comparison is Cap’n Jazz, thanks to Helmis’ improbably high squawk and lyrical obtusity, but Cap’n Jazz didn’t consider themselves emo. They were back-filled into the canon because of Mike Kinsella and Davey von Bohlen’s other projects.

The math-rock influences here show up in both the two-handed tapping riffs and the lurching phrasing that many of Algernon Cadwallader’s successors have discarded. Their omnivorous appetite and self deprecating humor shows up in the faux-motown “shoo bop bops” on “Motivational Song”. There’s the pop-punk intro/outro and waltz breakdown on “Katie’s Conscious”. The room-mic’d miscellaneous percussion on “On Up” sounds like it was stolen from the cutting room floor of the Sung Tongs sessions. If anything, these guys spearheaded the emo revival by not just reviving the spirit of Penfold and the Promise Ring, but by fusing it with all the other things they almost knew how to play.

This album was a decade out of print by the time Asian Man Records reissued it and it showed up on S***ify. The packaging is thrifty and environmentally friendly, but it doesn’t feel like any real corners were cut. The front cover’s playful, oblivious construction paper trees and alternate-colored text compliments the joyful explorations inside. A scalped kid eats prescription pills with chopsticks, brain exposed; it doesn’t feel gory, just wacky. Lyrics and thanks are printed in miniscule on the inside cover. All in all, a solid little package for an oddball disc.

Some Kind Of Cadwallader walks a tightrope of being funny, but not comedy; technical, but not sterile; original, but not pretentious. It is all of these things while still only being the product of a couple of guys drinking beer in various makeshift studios all over the suburbs of eastern Pennsylvania. I’m for it.

Some Kind Of Cadwallader by Algernon Cadwallader is a good album, and I like it.