spokane - the proud graduates

The application of "-core" genres is admittedly a fickle, silly, and largely baseless practice, used almost entirely to lump together bands that probably shouldn't be lumped together, all to make said bands a little easier to describe. This is true, and I will not and cannot try to fight it.

What gets lost in conversations about this kind of arbitrary genre creation, however, is the fact that on occasion, these made-up genres actually kinda work.

To be fair, the vast majority of these "-core" genres are total crap. Metalcore, slowcore, rapcore, skacore, emocore, deathcore, noisecore, post-core--all real genres people have created to describe various types of music, all of which are completely ridiculous. Most of them are too generic to work (deathcore), some don't even describe the music accurately (slowcore), and some are just fucking insane (post-core).

Then there are the few that actually work. Hardcore stands out first and foremost, since it was the one that started them all, though few people would argue that hardcore wasn't a legitimate genre when it was coined. Grindcore has become a commonly accepted genre, largely because the criteria for the music is so simple--loud, fast, short.

Then there's a genre I'm quite fond of, though I very well might be alone on this one: sadcore.

I can almost hear the Internet groans from the two or three people who might read this, but I don't care. When I see that word, I can instantly come up with bands that fit the same style and sound: Ida, Bedhead, Rex, Red House Painters, Codeine, American Music Club, and now Spokane.

All of these bands share enough common attributes to lump them together: depressing lyrical content; understated musical tones; simple, guitar-based songs; the use of silence and atmosphere; and finally, the 90s.

I'm aware that fans of "skacore" would probably attempt to make the same argument, but goddammit, I think I'm right here. I wholeheartedly agree that the name "sadcore" is stupid, but a lot of genre names were stupid at the outset. Punk, jazz, hip-hop, and even rock'n'roll were ignorant, dumb terms that somehow came to stand for various types of music, so I reserve the right to use an ignorant, dumb term of my own.

Now that that's out of the way, The Proud Graduates is an album by the SADCORE band Spokane. And it's pretty good.

Spokane falls somewhere between Red House Painters and Ida at their most jangly, but they rarely climb up to the lofty tiers of either group. Rick Alverson's vocals fit the style, but he simply does not have the power of Mark Kozelek, Daniel Littleton, or Elizabeth Mitchell. The songwriting is just fine, and the instrumentation is lush and wonderful throughout, and you can't go wrong with this album...but you can definitely go better.

Sadcore isn't the most diverse genre in the world. Almost always, the difference comes down to the personalities of the frontmen/women, since their very souls tend to be projected onto the music itself. Which makes it easy to like bands like this, but hard to love them. There always tends to be another band that does the same thing but better, and in Spokane's case, there are plenty of them.