The spring season has been an incredible time for debuts in our scene. Red Sun took the emo scene by storm with their first EP, “best buds 🙂”, and Wisconsin’s Excuse Me, Who Are You? has their first full-length LP releasing on 5/17. Also on 5/17, Columbus’s Brave Face is releasing their triumph of a debut LP.
The aptly-named “Grievance Process” is an incredibly personal album, blending elements of post-hardcore and emo in a passionate and personal description of grief and growth. The album carries a sense of weight, created both by the raw lyrics and incredible, driven drums. The opening track, “Blue Dodge Van”, immediately puts these drums on display. Heavy tom hits and fills immediately fill the atmosphere while the guitar builds a sense of scale. The first lines, “Home again/I pretend/And it’s killing me” immediately introduce one of the album’s main through lines – the struggle to find a real home, after experiencing this grief.
“Memorial” builds on everything “Blue Dodge Van” introduces – intense drums and a shrill guitar riff accompany singer Ryan Eliot’s rich clean vocals and desperate-sounding harsh vocals, both of which excel at expressing the pain, mourning, and anger that the song and album revolve around. The song crescendos with the lines, “I don’t need anything at all/I’ve left the past where I can’t see in a box behind the wall”, beautifully illustrating the desire to hide from what causes us grief.
“Philadelphia”, the album’s third track, is personally the track I expect to be most popular. The intense bass drives the song forward, with a quick paced, catchy start. The song quickly slows down though, with nothing but a guitar accompanying the softly delivered lines, “I’m just not at ease/and im not okay, but I’m doing fine/this house was on my shoulders/so you could see under my eyes,” once again painting a picture of a home that offers no comfort. The song explodes after these lines, with Eliot’s repeated scream of “I’m just so miserable” over some of the heaviest instrumentals the album has. The next track, “Dissociatives”, has a very similar structure, with a slow break in the middle of the song that builds back up to a strong finish, with Johnny Stevens of fellow Columbus band Undergrads singing the lines, “The ghost in the walls that reminds me of you/Tears up the floorboards and can’t speak the truth /Left vacant alone just to wallow/Left me with nothing to follow” twice, the second time in screams more reminiscent of metal vocals than anything you hear in the emo or even post-hardcore scenes.
“Please Don’t” is my personal favorite off of the album. Layered in reverb, Eliot’s vocals cry out into the vacant space created by the solitary guitar. The lines, “And I will write until my fucking fingers bleed/If it means you’re somehow closer to me” are easily my favorite off of the album, and encapsulate the mixed sense of loss, need, and desperation that characterizes the entire album. After these lines, the song takes off, with a rapid drum beat making the instrumental feel urgent or even frantic. The final scream of “And I just fucked it up” shows just how the grief of this loss has turned into self-loathing, a throughline through the latter half of the album.
The next track, Overcast, is the softest of the track, with much less screaming and much more emo stylings. In keeping with emo stereotypes, this song reads more like a breakup song than it does as being about a death or more permanent loss, largely thanks to the lines at the end, “I could never comprehend /But I will still accept the end/And hope that maybe we can start again”. The end of the song has the only screams, which contrast beautifully with the incredibly soft delivery of “and now it’s gone” as the very last line of the song.
The self-loathing I mentioned in “Please Don’t” becomes very apparent in the next two tracks, “Ashes” and “Greyscale”. “Ashes” serves as an opportunity for Eliot to really show off his vocal capabilities, with some of the richest singing and most intense screams on the album. A more hardcore instrumental makes this song stand out, again particularly in regards to the drums. This continues in “Greyscale”, which features a breakdown a little past the halfway point. Both of these songs have lines like the repeated “Burn me alive” in “Ashes” and “I feel the weight/of every mistake I’ve made” being the first two lines of “Greyscale”, again to reiterate the self-loathing that has come as a result of dealing with this loss.
The penultimate track, “Ghost”, is another favorite of mine. Following the not-uncommon trend of putting a slower song before your closer, “Ghost” features only a slow guitar and vocals for the first half of it’s duration. Fitting the title, the song describes the feeling of seeing someone you’ve lost in everything, and is a beautifully vulnerable track with an incredibly emotional ending.
The album finishes strong on “Divine Intervention”, the most optimistic song on the album. After “Ghost” has the line, “And I hope I never see you again”, it feels as though Eliot is finally moving through the grief central to the album, and “Divine Intervention” makes that clear with lines like, “I’ve never felt a home like this/Never thought I’d have to live” showing that Eliot has finally found a home, and a way to be comfortable living with absence. The final line of the album, a shouted “Goodbye”, carries so much weight, as the delivery of the line and accompanying instrumental give a sense of newfound resolve.
“Grievance Process” is a project that has clearly received so much love and passion, with Eliot even stating on the band’s twitter account that he first started writing the album back in 2016. The result is an incredibly emotional, gratifying record that puts you through the grief Eliot has experienced in an immensely moving way, that utilizes the stylings of Eliot’s favorite genres to an incredible result. The album is a triumphant display of lyricism and instrumental skill on every front, and is not an album you want to let slide under your radar this week.
The Diygest 
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