YOUR RENAISSANCE FEST: JEROMES DREAM, LOMA PRIETA, and friends
1720
Los Angeles
May 24, 2024
Screamo is a fickle beast often fawned over by the hard-to-please. As a derivative of emo, or “emotional hardcore,” with added elements of sonic dissonance and general malaise, the expansive genre has seen many iterations since its origins in the early 1990s. From progenitors like Heroin and Swing Kids, through bands like City of Caterpillar and Hot Cross, to hyper-popular groups like Underoath and Chiodos and late-aughts darlings Comadre, Touché Amoré, and La Bella, the genre has been on quite the bender. But across these varieties, with differences ranging from minute to glaring, two things are constant: the genre is fluid, and everyone disagrees about its tenets and borders. This fastidiousness — and songs with faces only a mother could love — was on full display last week at the mostly screamo Your Renaissance Fest at 1720 in Los Angeles, and I could barely subdue my contempt.
Because the history of screamo can be broken into distinct waves, it’s often quick work tracing the lineage of a band’s sound. Sure, the impulse to do this can suggest an exhausting disposition: a band can be, in a vacuum, objectively good, but sound too much like this band, or scream almost identically to those bands, and that reputation can seal their fate. Sadly, this was my reality for a lot of the acts on the first half of the bill. I blame a lot of this on the sound system, since 1720 is essentially a warehouse and I don’t love their acoustics for shows like this, but I definitely had a bone to pick after almost every opener.
Quiet Fear was the third band to play and one of my most anticipated of the evening. Maybe it was because I was closer to the front (or because they took sound-check more seriously than others) that they sounded flawless. They tore through tracks from Hasta la muerte si es preciso (2021) and their 2024 split with Massa Nera; it was a treat to see them play songs that I’ve cried to while in traffic, and play them so precisely. Knumears came on a few bands later and were one of my unexpected standouts as well. They seem better suited for packed living rooms at house shows with the crowd spilling onto the band, but hearing their version of blackened skramz live onstage was moving. Since they only have a couple of splits and one EP on their Bandcamp, I’m looking forward to new music and smaller venues in our future. Leading into the final stretch, Illinois-based Frail Body was up next. I’ve been semi-obsessed with them since A Brief Memoriam (2019), and further taken by their venture into emoviolence on their latest record, Artificial Bouquet (2024), so I was quite happy to finally see them do the dang thing. Then, as we came to the end of a maybe-too-congested fest for a single-stage venue, the closers started closing.
First up was Loma Prieta. I had a lot of firsts that evening, and getting to see these Bay Area legends was one of the more anticipated events of my stupid life. Since their start in 2005, they’ve become such a staple of the genre that other bands now “sound like Loma.” With six albums spanning their almost 20-year career, and me finding them in 2012 after their fourth release, I.V.(2012), their live show gave my little hater-heart the jolt it needed. Then, the last band of the night, the supremely appropriate finisher for a fest dedicated to screamo, were the iconic Connecticut-turned-NorCal band Jeromes Dream. I got into them extremely late, since I spent most of the 2000s obsessed with death metal/grindcore and eternally grossed out by screamo, but once I took the red pill and realized the swath of bands like JD that I’d ignored because their T‑shirts didn’t fit right, I was floored. It was truly an honor to see Jeromes Dream — a key player in the screamo family tree in 1997 — onstage, playing fresh material, and absolutely ripping like they invented it.
Still, even with an ending as dreamy as this, I was kind of annoyed. A part of me thinks it’s because a guy in the pit kept throwing beer on everyone or because I wished I had brought cigarettes, but I know it’s really because the guitarist of both bands, Sean Leary, kind of looks like Kevin Parker from Tame Impala, and man, does that guy bug the crap out of me. For no particular reason, but you probably wouldn’t understand anyway.
