Into It. Over It. did the whole 'lock yourself in a cabin' thing, and it worked
Around the time that Into It. Over It's Evan Weiss was promoting his second studio album, 2013's Intersections, his name was being thrown around as one of the leaders -- nay, "founding fathers" -- of something called the "emo revival."
In one interview that year, he called it a "backhanded compliment," considering the fact that he's been doing this since he started his first band, the Progress, in 2001. (The band broke up seven years later.) And while he's glad more underground DIY artists like himself are getting recognition, he rejects the notion that he's leading some sort of effort to resurrect a genre.
"I would be a liar if I told you I didn't love those bands when I was a teenager," Weiss tells Mashable of bands like Sunny Day Real Estate and the Promise Ring. "I'm happy to embrace if people think my music is a part of that, but I don't feel like [the "revival"] is something that I've ever been involved with."
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For his third studio album, the Chicago-based singer-songwriter decided to instead ignore what people were saying, forget about the coronation emo fans had given him and "just write what I want to write."
"I spent my whole last record being so invested in what people thought about what i was doing or like what my approach was like," he said. "It really made the whole thing way less fun."
So in order to fully escape the noise, he and drummer and writing partner Josh Sparks holed up in a cabin in Vermont for a month to write.
"It really helped me get out of my own head and be able to write and not think about where we were going or what was going on outside of us," he says. "I didn't feel rushed for pressured, and I wasn't overthinking the process too much."
And while the escape-to-a-cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere narrative is one that's been overdone the point of mockery, the effect it had on Weiss' songwriting is real and genuine. Standards, Weiss' strongest and sharpest work so far, is a result of of trusting your instincts.
It's also a result of good company: Weiss teamed with producer John Vanderslice -- who's worked with Spoon, Mountain Goats, and Death Cab for Cutie -- for Standards. "Anesthetic," a song that Weiss says is comparing a relationship "to being under local anesthesia," indeed sounds like that state halfway between living and dead, conscious and unconscious -- a woozy, hazy place in the middle.
But "Vis Major" and "Adult Contempt" are both fully awake, caffeinated, even, with rolling drums and crisp guitar, Weiss singing out rather than cooing. "Your Lasting Image," meanwhile, is a beautifully minimal thing that gives you the feeling that you, like Weiss, are staring into "an endless expanse."
Weiss told Mashable he considers his songwriting to be his "most focused" on Standards, and it holds up. Album opener "Open Casket" is about his "uninspired" friends from back home who "want my neck hangin' high up on a noose," but Weiss hits back in a biting way: "I'd feel better as a corpse/ Than a boring barely-living thing." Weiss tells Mashable that "No EQ" is about the Progress' recent reunion show, and the inevitable "What if?" moment he had with his former bandmates, and he captures that with powerful imagery: "Nostalgia's been strewn around/On the concrete beside your house."
With all that, there's one thing not on Standards: The alienation "her," the view of women as the source of men's pain, a topic which has been a topic of discussion in the genre and which Jessica Hopper wrote about in her 2015 essay "Where the Girls Aren't."
"I haven't written a romantic song about a girl in a long time, probably three records ago," Weiss says, explaining that "Old and Ivory" is about his grandfather who fought in WWII, and "Your Lasting Image" is about a falling out with a friend. Rather, Standards, has a way of relating with anyone who has emotions, man or woman, and whether you believe in the "emo revival" or not.
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