Hot Mulligan are bringing midwest emo back
To the casual listener, the only difference between conventional emo and midwest emo seems to be that the latter prefer pouring their hearts out while wearing flannel and small beanies. In contrast, the former enjoy eyeliner and Gerard Way a little bit more.
Wading into the debate about which bands belong to what specific sub-genre can quickly become murky waters, especially when it comes to the tribalism of emo’s many sub-sections. But midwest emo is very much its own beast, owing to its split from hardcore punk in the late 1980s. The genre took screaming vocals but divorced itself from the anger and fast guitars, favouring angsty, introspective lyrics and a touch of math rock nerdiness.
While punk rallied against ‘The Man’, midwest emo’s problems tended to be more romantically concerned. One of its most well-known anthems comes courtesy of American Football’s broody ‘Never Meant’, which is a pretty good barometer for the genre’s emotional stylings: “Let’s just forget everything said, and everything we did, best friends and better halves, goodbyes”.
It was bands like American Football, Sunny Day Real Estate, Cap’n Jazz, and Texas Is The Reason that led the charge in creating the regional style of mid-to-late 1990s emo, and then bands like Modern Baseball, Mom Jeans, The Front Bottoms, and Joyce Manor who revived it in the mid-2010s.
It’s now fallen to Michigan-based Hot Mulligan to lead yet another resurgence. Their third album, Why Would I Watch, evokes the energy of the earlier ’90s more pop-punk sound with the combined emotional brutality of midwest emo.
Why Would I Watch is the perfect marriage of the two, with midwest emo’s emotional theatrics wrapped in a balm of The Wonder Years-esque pop-rock fills. Vocalist Nathan ‘Tades’ Sanville is as capable of gutturally screaming as he is tackling grief on downbeat acoustic ‘Betty’, as the vocals belt out: “Nothing left to do but hope and medicate / Held her fingers so she’d wake with me / Get drunk and stay awake for days, I’d watch her breathe”. But the album doesn’t take itself too seriously (‘Betty’ is about Sanville grieving his dead rat), as track titles’ Cock Party 2 (Better Than The First)’ and ‘John “The Rock” Cena, Can You Smell What the Undertaker’ are enduring proof of.
The subject matter is a lot more complex than the titles would have you believe, though. Sanville told once explained that the John Cena number was about his tangled relationship with religion and his body.
“Christianity sure fucks up a lot of kids,” he said. “I remember being like 12 at a water park and feeling ashamed of my body in a swimsuit because I thought being that exposed was sinful. I lost my faith when I was almost 16, but the damage was done. Here I am now with body dysmorphia and some kind of complex about being evil. ‘John ‘The Rock’ Cena’ breaks down what that church did to me and how I tried to be a good Christian boy.”
These themes, and others that rear their ugly heads, like alcoholism and fledgling mental health, are always sat in stark opposition to the jangly, often groovy instrumentation – something even midwest’s best could easily be accused of lacking. It’s been reduced to a joke in the scene that you could set a breakup voicemail or any random chat with a serious tone, splice it with a heavy drum intro, and you’d pretty much nail the formula.
But Hot Mulligan are able to hark back to the basic tenets of punk and emo – as the high-speed double-time skate beats the album showcases – without feeling formulaic, never straying too far from the lyrical doldrums of midwest emo. That’s what’s so interesting about Hot Mulligan’s ‘revivalist’ title because they’re calling back to old favourites whilst bringing a new freshness to the genre.
This manoeuvre is best summed up by Chris Freeman, one-half of the songwriting duo in Hot Mulligan, who explained he wasn’t happy trying to channel the defeatist: “‘You’ll be fine’ energy” of their predecessors, not wanting to resign the band to just playing riffs that were fast and heavy. “It’s probably objectively good and catchy,” he explained. “But it’s not stimulating my sense of wanting to do something new”. Why Would I Watch resolutely scratches that itch.
