If we're being honest, many of our emotions aren't the pretty ones. Yes, there are plenty of moments of joy and love that fill us with warmth, but a lot of us tend to let those be flashes of fleeting joy while spending more time stewing with the ugly ones. The sadness. The pain. The frustration. The grief. The anger.
It makes sense that people use music as an escape from the ugly emotions — people with pitch-perfect vocals crystalizing the good feelings as a comforting audio blanket. But that clean veneer can often glisten with too much of a sheen, and sometimes folks just want to lean into exasperation to musically vent and release their inner steam.
The Front Bottoms exist for those people. Brian Sella, the singer/guitarist for the New Jersey emo folk punk band, doesn't so much sing his angsty tales of love and loss as he yelps them out. There's an inherent urgency in every line delivery, like he's gotta get his thoughts out ASAP for fear of them building up a pressure that would make him explode from the inside. At times he can seem petulant, silly, hostile, snotty and heartbroken within the span of verse, but you believe the urgency because there's a non-polished characteristic of his voice that's inherently and immensely relatable in a way that vocal powerhouses with their unattainable skill simply cannot capture.
That relatable vulnerability is The Front Bottoms' superpower.
"Vulnerability is a really incredible word," says Sella. "That's the word for sure."
"The human aspect of it is something that I've kind of realized is important," Sella continues. "When people put a song on, and they can hear the guy singing and are like 'Oh, OK, I could see this guy singing'? That is the Front Bottoms. I'm trying to always create that, like: Let's lean into the fact that I can't hit any of these notes."
"Back in the day when we were making those songs, I was so f—-ing high strung. I was frantically on edge, because it was like, every single one of these lyrics is like, gonna be the last lyric I sing. And now that I'm a little bit older, it is a little bit more relaxed. I'm not screaming the songs because I'm so stressed, I'm screaming them so that they sound good now. So obviously, that original feeling of hysteria, it's kind of hard to recreate that because I'm not 20 years old anymore, but I can lean into other developments and other techniques and stuff."
The Front Bottoms came up through the New Jersey scene with a folk-punk, scrappy underdog sound centered on Sella's anxious vocals and acoustic guitar fretting and Mat Uychich's drumming, and built up a following through self-released albums and MySpace.
The aforementioned extreme vulnerability might turn off certain sects, but it also the type of thing that can build a niche fanbase that's super passionate. And that audience grew exponentially with the release of their stellar first two "official" LPs, The Front Bottoms and Talon of the Hawk. While it's hard to top the raw emotional impact of those records, the band has continued to evolve and expand sounds into a bit more fleshed-out rock sounds on the full-lengths like Back on Top, Going Gray and, most recently, 2020's In Sickness & In Flames. Sella is conscious that the group couldn't dwell in that realm of oversharing youthful zeal forever.
"I think I know where the [oversharing] line is," Sella says. "It is definitely tough now, though, with the internet. If I sing a song about beating my dad to death with a baseball bat... when we put that song out, nobody was listening to the song. So now, everybody could listen to the song. You even don't need to buy the record, it could be on your Instagram feed or whatever."
"If I make a song, and there's like a lyric that's a little bit too intense, Mat will say, 'Hey maybe we chill that one out,' you know?" Sella continues. "Like we went into the label the other day and played some songs. And there were definitely a few titles and a few lyrics that were making everyone uncomfortable, for sure. And I'm like, 'That's cool! That's what this is. This is art.' I have no problem changing things, because it really is about the vulnerability for me. And you can't be more vulnerable than if somebody's like, 'Oh, you should change this. That's a little too intense.' And I'm like, 'OK, I will change it.' It's an important part of the process."
For the latest Front Bottoms release, the EP Theresa, the band mixes a little of the old with a little of the new. Theresa is the latest entry in the Front Bottoms' Grandma series (following 2014's Rose and 2018's Ann), a collection of EPs dedicated to their beloved elders, which finds the band properly releasing polished renditions of tunes from the early days that only existed via rough live versions that became cherished gems among diehard fans.
"We would record demos and put them out on the internet that night. The recording process of the songs was never important," says Sella. "Before this, it was really just songs that we'd play live. Kids would yell them, and then I would forget how to play them. There was a lot of — excuse the term — magic in those recordings that people definitely really connected to. And those still all exist. This is just a new sort of way that we could give them an official release."
For Sella, the Grandma EPs don't exist just to rehash the old while peppering them with new techniques and skills he's picked up. In his mind it's an art project, one which gives fans a deeper Front Bottoms well to draw from.
"When I go in and approach these Grandma series, I'm essentially relearning the songs and like adding 10 years of life to it," he says. "I definitely want to be like a catalog band. Where it's like, 'Oh man, I found this one song that I like and then I went back and found that they had like 250 songs, and all these different EPs, and different versions.' I kind of like that feeling in terms of a career."
Expect a slew of those formerly live show-only tunes in the set when the Front Bottoms swing through Spokane alongside the tremendous Welsh melodic shoegaze band the Joy Formidable. It should be a terrific, varied combo as the Joy Formidable's shredding sound falls on the other end of the polished rock spectrum compared to the Front Bottoms.
Unlike many performers who often struggle with being away from home during the grind of tour, the communal vulnerability of Front Bottoms shows actually invigorates Sella. It's an escape from the fraught thoughts that swirl throughout Sella's head and spill into his lyrics. Fittingly for this tour, those sweaty clubs packed with kids and young adults singing along to his miseries are a true place of joy for Sella.
"It is such an escape to go on tour," Sella says. "Like, it solves all my problems." ♦
The Front Bottoms, The Joy Formidable, Mobley • Fri, Sept. 30 at 8 pm • $30 • All ages • Knitting Factory • 919 W. Sprague Ave. • sp.knittingfactory.com
