Review: Dayseeker – Origin

–Written by Michael Hogan

First off, I’d like to apologize, at this point I really must be sounding like a broken record. Blah, blah, blah, another good post-hardcore album, but I swear it’s been a remarkable year for the genre. And this is honestly a release that I didn’t see coming. Dayseeker is one of those bands that I have heard about time and time again, but I never took the time to listen to. I was sure they were going to be good, but of course, I was full of excuses; I was too busy, there were too many other things I wanted to listen to, and so on. Everyone I spoke to was excited about this album, and yet I never bothered to look up their previous work to figure out what I was in for. I’m almost glad I didn’t though, it gave me a clean slate with a remarkable album and an even more remarkable band. Earlier this month, when I had to review Dance Gavin Dance’s Instant Gratification, I knew I was holding it against Acceptance Speech, and I would be lying if I didn’t say that it introduced a not insignificant amount of subconscious bias into my perception of the album. I didn’t have that here, I listened to Origin in the freshest way possible. I had no preconceived notions of what to expect, I didn’t even have any idea what the band sounded like, and I feel like that helped make the experience all that more organic and honest.

As much as these guys have been talked up to me, I guess I was sort of expecting the same old stuff. Just another one of those jaded music industry guys that’s heard his share of post-hardcore bands, listening to a newcomer to the scene which, if you’re properly jaded like me, you know simply cannot compare to the old guard. I listened to it while my mind was elsewhere, I was out working on my car and I simply had it on in the background; a perfect way to give an album an in depth listen and objectively review the quality of a piece of art that a bunch of guys put countless hours of their lives and their entire heart and soul into. As if this piece weren’t already dripping with enough self-depreciating sarcasm. But I kept finding myself getting distracted by the music; it drew my attention away from something that I was wholly devoted to, and demanded I give it the proper focus. I knew I had missed a lot, and I was missing a very remarkable album. From the snippets I caught, I knew I needed to give this a real chance.

This was actually such an important thing for me that this review is nearly a week late. Most albums I can go through once or twice and really have a good enough feel for it to write 750-ish words about it, but this was not one of those albums. I poured over it, devoted my entire self to it, over and over and over. I listened to it on repeat, I listened to it on my way to work, on my way home to work, at the gym, when I was working at home. I needed to intimately know every single note on this album. That’s how brilliant it is. Yes, it’s another post-hardcore album, but this is very very different. This album has so many dynamic moments, the perfect juxtaposition between the clean vocals and the distressed screams, balancing out into a final product that really can be described as gorgeous.

Upon my listen number 12 or so, my girlfriend asked me, “Why do you like such angry music?” But I never thought of it like that. She had only heard one snippet of a song which was, admittedly, a bit on the angry side, but that’s not the point of this album. This album needs to be taken in as a whole, it is definitely the sum of it’s parts; every single detail comes together to form a beautiful, if pained, piece of music. It is not a happy album, but it is not “angry music”, the album has passion, it has distress, it has pain, and yes, it has anger, but it is not an angry album. It is a deep, intricate expression of equally deep and intricate emotions, set to a perfect post-hardcore soundtrack. It has all the details of the classics that made the genre so spectacular to begin with, and as much as I was begrudgingly against another band showing up the legends of the genre, that is precisely what Dayseeker did with this album. They’ve made a believer out of me. I know I said not so long ago that Instant Gratification is the album of the year, but Origin is certainly nipping at its heels.