Placeholder – Nothing Is Pure

Changing a band’s name from Coastal to Placeholder reads like a move in pursuit of perennial obscurity, and changing a band’s name from anything to Placeholder reads like a “fuck off!” to anyone listening, and anyone who may have been in some future danger of listening. The bigger fuck-off that Placeholder has been able to pull off, however, comes in the form of releasing a successful album that is not just emo, but old-school emo (isn’t it weird being so old that there’s now such thing as “old-school emo?”) of a species that evolved into the rock-ey and rocky form we know today.

Vocalist Brandon Gepfer’s voice is right at home in the genre, and dynamic enough to meet the demands of Placeholder’s ambitious goals. While they seem comfortable styling themselves as a harkening back to the early days of emo – a placard from Nothing is Pure’s label Better Days proudly proclaims them as such – that isn’t quite right, and more latter-day, hardcore incarnations of the style appear throughout, especially on early tracks like “Give Up.”

Unfortunately, Nothing is Pure simply doesn’t have enough to recommend it to begin heralding the return of the genre. The bulk of the album runs together and leans too heavily on Gepfer’s voice to take the music to places the rapid-fire style can’t go in terms of range and depth. The two best tracks, “Nothing is Pure” and “Only Ever After,” bookend the album and are purely twenty-first century creations, purely unlike the work Placeholder is interested in referencing. Elsewhere, the attempt to conjure Jimmy Eat World and the like is largely successful, but only insofar as the most perfectly average sound from that band’s early work comes through. This album has been positively characterized as “old-school;” a harsher but no less accurate caricature would be “heard before.”

The heavy instrumentation gives the band a quality beyond its age (even given its numerous incarnations), but its lyric-craft does not achieve the same effect. This album has a lot of “rain falling on her hair,” a lot of “being under pressure,” a lot of “I want to kill myself!” that twenty years into the genre are too tired to serve as even passable lines. No one can take away teenager’s right to throw him- or herself around the room screaming along to songs about suicide, but fans old enough to have experienced the numerous rises and falls of hardcore emotional may have a hard time avoiding rolling their eyes as we hear yet again about how “What I hate is what you love.”

The contradiction of a style based on raw emotional bloodletting is what happens decades after the first wound is opened.  Placeholder is a talented, exciting band from a school of musical thought that, at its inception, prided itself on not aging well.