Review Summary: Love from the valley.
I don’t know what it is. It could pertain to history-the local region being a once spritely and prosperous coal mining area that was eventually made obsolete by both better fuels and unfortunate disasters (i.e, Knox mine disaster in which my current place of residence had it's whole below-ground infrastructure flooded by the Susquehanna). Or perhaps it goes beyond that, a mentality embedded that makes older locals both staunchly proud of where they were born and younger generations wanna book it for anywhere-***ing-else. There is an odd atmosphere that pervades my hometown and that which surrounds it, something of washed-up has-beens and blunt sentimentality. It makes for a simple and beautiful and sad breeding ground of emo-punk, ala Tigers Jaw and Title Fight and now, One Step Closer. It is the latter band that is the modern-day torchbearer of pain in self-reflection, the angst that courses through daily life trying to process the menace of the world that surrounds you.
On
This Place You Know, One Step Closer taps into this dichotomy through both fierce, lightning in a bottle-riffage and hazy, sleepy atmospheres that seem to segway into each other quite naturally. “Pringle Street” into “Hereafter” are wonderful examples of this ability to allow desperation and rage to become awash in complacency and complicity, as if in the wake of that catharsis there is a calm that can be gleaned from it. Actually, it’s as if these two feelings coexist in a harmony that starts to create a feeling akin to warmth and love. It’s a stretch beyond a stretch-a handful of strangers extending love to a bunch of nameless obsolete music-bloggers, but by the friggin gods do songs like “I Feel So” and “Autumn” make you begin to believe.
It isn’t an entirely
new feeling, for sure. This is evidenced by the way their influences seep through-with the vocals borrowing much from the snappy barks of Have Heart and the softer moments owing a lot to the fuzzy indie-rock leanings that Title Fight sometimes would go into, but it is still a torch that is carried with great gusto. One Step Closer are a band that sound like they are steamrolling on the unyielding love and hatred and confusion that come with youth, that come with meandering through life’s hallways and being discouraged with every dead end. This beautiful dismay comes to a head on “As the City Sleeps”, as drum rolls build furiously into mournful melodic leads and a hybrid of cathartic barks and defeated yells. In this, for as young as they are, I believe One Step Closer has captured the essence of living-accepting all your defeats and wandering through the maze for something better that should come. Becoming one step closer to self-completion.
