State Lines: Hoffman Manor

Emo from Long Island. I mean who wouldn’t be sad-ish growing up in a place with basically one road in and one road out? Just knowing that a well-placed ballistic missile could cut you off from the know world, despite being an appendage to the most populous island city in the US. It all just says emo. As does State Line and their 2011 album, Hoffman Manor. A chunk of this current millennium that I have not a whole lot of recollection being super-saturated with rock music. More so all those dance remixes and dubstep drops. So, I’ll take what I can get.

I feel like the word derivative is derivative. But how else to describe this layered sad-boy emo pop-punk music? A bunch of teenagers always complaining about out how “tired” they are. Despite lead singer, Jonathan DiMitri (aka Jade Lilitri) being around 18 when this album came out. That’s way too young to be this beat up by life, my dude. But, hey, his sorrow is our glee. Or our sick enjoyment, I guess. They certainly aren’t breaking a ton of new ground in this genre, even for the time — fourth wave emo or wherever we are at this point — but the songs are entertainingly put together and recorded. The vocals forward in the mix, lots of breakdowns and swirly guitars and those pleasing harmonies that this music is kind of know for. I was always waiting for some raw-throated screaming, but it never went there. I would have probably enjoyed that.

Mostly it reminds me of bands like The Hotelier and, of course, Lilitri’s later band, Oso Oso. It has this very conversational tone that also makes Long Island into an almost relatable small town on the edge of the big city. A Thursday special. A state of being that can somehow be more lonely than just living in the middle of nowhere like some of their Midwestern emo idols. Of course, they talk directly about their love of the Alkaline Trio song “Cringe” on their album, Goddamnit!, so I suppose that couldn’t be more clear where their influences lie. And, as a person who has that album on my [secret] Mount Rushmore, I get it. This is a classic “run away from this place” album — a classic theme of a lot of this type of indie rock music, the most obvious example being the Get Up Kids oeuvre — and I’m here for it.