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Tag: Fight Off Your Demons

Drift Wood Miracle’s emo-revival offerings are passionate and impressive

There’s a lot to be said musically and sociologically about why the emo revival is interesting, but spilling that ink here would do a disservice to Drift Wood Miracle. Even if DWM is the band that has me thinking about it, I think it’s more important to note that this quartet has instrumental chops, songwriting skills, melodic prowess, and the earnest passion to pull it all off. I caught their live show at Kings Barcade last Saturday, and the performance was electric.

The quartet features a relatively traditional setup: two electric guitars, a bass, and a drummer. One of the guitarists and the drummer trade lead vocals, which is only one way the band adds diversity to their set. The band does a great job of covering the acoustic/rock/punk/post-hardcore spectrum, as their set featured highlight moments or songs in each of those genres. They’re comfortable with fragile, gentle emoting and thrashing, technical post-hardcore. “My Condition” handles both extremes with ease, but they can express the emotions on their own as well; “Solum” is a beautiful, tender ballad that sounds like the work of a veteran group of musicians.

It’s one thing to make a racket with walls of amps and speakers, but it’s quite another to resist rock’n’roll and mic your 65-watt amps. The little amps that the members of DWM put on stage thrilled me for a variety of reasons: it nodded to the punk “make do with what you’ve got” ethic, underscores the lack of pretense in the band, shows that the talent here is not just a function of nice equipment/recording, and displays the youth of members. To be this talented while still be in high school is rare indeed.

Many emo bands can be less than energetic live, as the band just stands there. Drift Wood Miracle wasn’t going all Rites of Spring on us, but they definitely showed their passion for the music throughout the set: guitar waving, stomping around the stage, and some passionate jumps (not to be confused with theatrical “rock jumps”) made me feel like I could do more than bob my head to the music. It was a good feeling to watch a band be moved by their own music and then feel the desire to move with it too. This is by no means a new thing–I’ve been moshing and dancing and jumping and bouncing at shows for years. But Drift Wood Miracle got me into it, and that’s a thing worth praising.

Drift Wood Miracle’s rock/punk/emo is impressive and worth checking out. Appropriately, a guy in the audience was wearing a Brand New “Fight Off Your Demons” shirt (The hook in the raw “To Endeavor” contains a modified Brand New quote, even). If you’re into that Brand New/Thursday/early ’00s emo sound, you’ll love Drift Wood Miracle.