Pull Up the Floorboards

The first full-length by Lock & Key delivers of the promise of their 2003 EP by stripping down their music to its post-hardcore basics. Although the term "emo" has been so casually applied (to bands as fundamentally unalike as Dashboard Confessional and Weezer) that it's basically useless anymore, Pull Up the Floorboards reminds listeners of what the term meant in its earliest incarnation. Lock & Key's influences are fairly obvious — echoes of Fugazi, Hot Water Music, and to a lesser extent Sunny Day Real Estate, abound — but the key factor is that the quartet do this sort of thing really, really well. Singer Ryan Shanahan has the gruff, barking but never tuneless vocals, and he and second guitarist Mike Vera rarely succumb to the sort of lockstep unison riffage that weighs down so many albums of this type. Songs like "The Process of Molting" are passionate without the irritating affectations of "lookit how intense I am 'n' stuff" that dogs so many less mature bands, and although "Volatile" is so Fugazi-like you'll be checking the liner notes to make sure it's not a cover, it's also the most powerful song on the album.