CD Review: The March Divide "Billions" (self-released)

If you should happen to read every review I write or have just been following my writings on a whole you could easily chart my musical listening preferences from genre to genre throughout the course of my lifetime.    Oddly, I somehow was at the appropriate age when emo was spawned as a genre to appreciate the whole loneliness and angst factors that help to shape it.

Over the years I haven't really paid much attention to the genre known as "emo" mostly because I don't care.   Most of the bands that I liked have long since broken up and the ones that have stayed together only release lesser versions of themselves on new albums.  (Though the idea of Saves the Day playing "Through Being Cool" live kind of interests me)  I have no time for new "emo" bands because I'm old, married and have a child so I'm not in that same place as I was back in the early '00s.

What you have to understand about The March Divide, who I am not reviewing for the first time now but with "Billions" those previous reviews seem almost childish, is that they are picking up the pieces of that forgotten (about on purpose) genre and put them back together to create something that should win over even the most jaded of us.

Now I am in no way saying that there aren't bands creating music under the genre of "emo" because some are doing it without wanting to be labeled as such.   But what I am saying is that those bands don't really seem to matter as much and so when you just focus on this one somewhat newer band playing the greatest hits of your formidable years, well, it's impactful to say the least.

Growing up and really having some of the best times of my life during those years when I'd drive to New Jersey (no joke) to see a band play, you know, in a lot of ways I feel like "Billions" is being written and played just for me.   The thing I realize, of course, is that there are just as many other people out there who loved the bands I did and so this could feel just as personal for them.

Musically this is somewhere between Yellowcard without the pop and there are a lot of I Am the Avalanche/The Movielife undertones and, hey, yeah, seeing The March Divide tour with the Avalanche... someone should make that happen if it hasn't already (I'm not hip to the tours because outside and I don't get along)  I mean, I could pull out band names for comparison that I listened to like Park and Day at the Fair but the reality is that this is more than that.

The song "Given Out" opens with a line about putting on records from ten years ago.   It's kind of funny because that was such a strange time for music yet such a good time for me because of the bands that existed (Though on the whole it will never be remembered like the 1990s grunge movement, for instance)   "Billions" is as important an album as The March Divide is a band and this is about feeling a way that you could only otherwise feel by putting on music recorded what seems like a lifetime ago.