Brave Faces Everyone

Tea pairing: English Breakfast with milk and sugar

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If any year could be described as emo, and many other things, it would be the dumpster fire that was 2020. Luckily for emo and punk fans, Spanish Love Song’s stellar third album, Brave Faces Everyone, brought fans a healthy dose of bummer jams in an already bummer year.

The Los Angeles quintet’s album starts on a real downer of a song, “Routine Pain”, as lead singer Dylan Slocum croons “On any given day I’m a six out of 10/Bed to desk to bar, eyes on the floor/Still apologizing for the way I’ve been/Each breath more full of shit than the last.

These first few lines are a perfect foreshadowing of the next nine songs as each one follows the same themes of depression, self-deprecation, heartache, and doubt, along with a few tracks that touch on numerous political and social issues.

Dylan Slocum and company are acutely aware of their lyricsim as each song that follows after another feels like a new chapter in a book, filled with overarching themes and grandiose guitars, drums, and just a touch of synths provided carefully by keyboardist Meredith Van Woert.

Definite highlights on the jam packed emo-rager of an album are “Losers” and “Losers 2”. “Losers” is a through and through emo-punk ballad reminiscent of Jawbreaker and peers The Menzingers as Slocum shouts his way through inescapable feelings of self hate.

Aside from being a sequel of sorts to “Losers”, “Losers 2” has more in common with “Optimism (As a Radical Life Choice)” as both provide commentary on today’s social issues and the housing market crash of 2008.

In the former track, Slocum sings “Staring like a stranger from the dirt field/Across from my, my childhood home/Noticed how out of place I looked there/It’s a place I can’t afford/When my family lost it back in ‘08”.

The hardships of the recession mixed with the emo flare of the song make for a truly stark recountment of a rather dark period in recent US history. And, as stated above, the presence of this social commentary only pushes the darkness present of the album.

In “Optimism (As as Radical Life Choice)” the questionable inner workings of capitalism and America’s gun issues are discussed on top of the bigger picture of a world teetering on the edge. How apt for a year like 2020?

The social talking points and hot button issues that are sprinkled through the album do not make Brave Faces Everyone a political album through and through, it simply paints Spanish Love Songs as a socially aware group who have been impacted by the same world we live in.

The songs also depict the band as faulty; not as a group, but as people. We’re all looking for that silver lining, optimism in the face of evil, the light in the darkest moments of our lives. Unlike their previous two efforts,

Brave Faces feels like an honest depiction of what the band is, and how their self labeled “grouch rock” encompasses their lyrics.

This is clearly not a feel-good album, but that does not discount the glints of hope that shine through the darkness the album presents. In one of the darkest years since, well, ever, Spanish Love Songs capitalizes on the hopelessness we are all going through, except they’re doing it with crunchy Weezer-esque guitar chords and thunderous drums.