Sometimes you just gotta go straight to the elevator pitch: what if the xx came up on American Football instead of Aaliyah? Though his post-production methods put him within the scope of downtempo, monastic R&B, Joey Vannucchi uses the compositional tools of twinkly, technical emo—clean guitar figures criss-crossed in askew time signatures, hopscotching drum rhythms, hushed vocals piecing together desires for someone always out of the frame. It’s hard to tell where the meticulous mood-setting of one format begins and the other ends, but you’ve got 68 minutes on From Indian Lakes’ fourth LP to figure it out: this is Vannucchi’s sound and he doesn’t deviate much from it.
While “the first math rock make-out album” is certainly a novel concept, it’s no gimmick; the singular aesthetic here has been in development for the better part of a decade. The first biographical nugget often told of Vannucchi is that he grew up in isolation and without electricity on a 40-acre parcel of land near Yosemite National Park. There wasn’t much to do besides obsess over music and play drums in a church basement, so it makes sense that his first two self-recorded and self-released albums drew from formative listening staples like Radiohead, but also Death Cab for Cutie and quasi-Christian alternative acts like Copeland, As Tall as Lions, and Lydia that once filled the midsection on Bamboozle festival posters.
Vannucchi’s upbringing makes for a nice story, though From Indian Lakes’ trajectory should be quite familiar to rock fans this point: band from far outside a major media center, too introspective and ambitious to be pigeonholed in pop-punk, finds an audience alienated by both the juvenilia of Warped Tour and painful curation of cool that defined mainstream indie. This is basically how the emo revival happened, and by 2014’s Absent Sounds, From Indian Lakes had signed to Triple Crown, now the home of Into It. Over It., You Blew It!, Sorority Noise, and Foxing, bands representative of the current day’s more thoughtful and enlightened popular emo.
This trajectory has coincided with Vannucchi shearing off every conceivable marker of his alt-rock beginnings until there’s nothing left but the pretty stuff. The blushing fauna gracing the album cover has become a familiar sight in emo’s ongoing progressive, pastoral phase, but nothing has truly embodied humidified, aural verdancy like *Everything Feels Better Now. *Though Vannucchi’s arrangements are intricately crafted, every sound gets subjected to a unifying greenhouse effect, distorted guitars, vibraphones, panning effects and tremolo shudders all becoming soft, yielding textures drooping into each other.
