Minor World

If there were such a musical genre/category as "post-emo," perhaps City of Ships would be its poster child. The Richmond, Virginia natives certainly seem to perform their songs with a recognizable (though non-hysterical) emo aesthetic, particularly where the vocal idiosyncrasies are concerned. But the way they slow down those songs and spare them that genre's sheer masturbatory urgency winds up doing their thoughtful lyrics more justice than the jittery older template ever could. Who knew? This insistently deliberate pacing (even the bracing "Tantric Engineer" is bursting with pent-up energy, but never sprints off into the distance) also gives the entire album a subtle dreamlike quality — and not just during songs that focus on softer indie rock dynamics, such as "Darkness at Noon," "Easy Way/Hard Way," and "Sweet Delirium." There are also several tracks that interchange lightly picked melodies with bashing power chords and thus achieve absorbing hard/soft contrasts, including "Clotilde," "Subrosa, and others, among which one arguably finds the cream of this album's crop (and don't forget the aforementioned exception, "Tantric Engineer"). In any case, Minor World is an unexpected revelation of sorts, embalming emo's mottled carcass with some belated validity, and maybe even a way forward, just when you thought there was no point even attending the funeral.