Living Room - Dream Journal

Here is your chance to be the ultimate hipster!  You can finally be like, “I knew this band BEFORE they were cool!” There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Living Room will soon be very, very cool.  These four dudes from Brooklyn put out a pretty impressive EP in 2012 with Dream Journal. It reminds me of a grittier You Blew It! and Joyce Manor. I’ll even go as far as saying I hear some early Brand New influences.

 

“I’ll probably wake up in the forest/ And I won't have to pretend that the curvature of your spine means that I just lost a friend/ And I’ll meet you in the river with white moths and marigolds/ We can wait on 

it all winter but we both know we won't.”

 

The first of five songs on Living Room’s first music release, “Falling Asleep Walking,” starts off strong.  They didn’t start off with a quiet, slow song like many EPs tend to stick to.  The drums are pounding; the lead singer’s voice is straining with every line.  The guitars on this track in particular remind me of Tiny Moving Parts – they seems a little all over the place, but fit in with the singer’s voice seamlessly.  

 

A very underrated quality of any music release is how well the songs fit in with each other.  The ending chords of “Falling Asleep Walking” beautifully transition into “Blue Stars.”  

 

The second song is just as upbeat and fast as the first. It ends almost too quickly, only being 2 minutes and 34 seconds long.  I can imagine them playing a show and everyone screaming back at them “Do I really have a hand in my forgetting? / Till the end my thoughts are never ending!” What a great line.

 

“Red Saints” is a perfect halfway point for Dream Journal.  Nearly twice as long as the first two songs off the release, it has a much calmer vibe to it.  The lyrics are poetic and touching, with lines like “Sometimes it feels like your ghost lives inside my lungs like the smoke.”  There’s a long instrumental towards the end that really shows off how talented these four city guys really are.

 

The fourth track “Spiral Galaxy Arms” is, in my opinion, the catchiest song on the entire EP.  It’s catchy and highly jam-able, but in a different way than most songs that follow a verse-chorus-verse formula.  Living Room strays away from anything that’s formulaic.  Each line is unique and hard, yet still flows into the next without going back to the same chorus over and over.  The lines of this song are short but powerful: “I realize I don't do these things to feel alive / I do them to forget in the softest sense / Kill myself / A spell is just a spell/ But these spirals give me hell.”

 

The final song “Life Lines” starts off as if it were the first song on the EP by beginning very quietly, then picking up after thirty seconds, but maintains an overarching sadness in passages such as “But when did we learn to lie?/ Soften your eyes/ Keep drawing lines to cross/ And realize love doesn't belong to us.”  

 

I love myself a good emo jam, so Dream Journal gets a high rating from me. Although, I wouldn’t define Living Room as just an emo or punk band.  You can’t just slap a label on these guys and have it define their whole sound.  They’re much more than just one clear-cut genre. With their debut LP Moonchaser around the corner, I’m excited to see where the future takes these guys.  They’re Brooklyn natives, and the next time they come to my New Jersey turf, I’m definitely going to check them out. Keep your eyes out for Living Room – they’re going to be a big deal.