165. Song No. 2,431: “The Deep South,” The Promise Ring
Very Emergency, 1999

Man, I have hit a vein of nostalgia and The Promise Ring is especially deserving of that deep fondness these staples of late high school/early college are churning up. Though this band is definitely more of a feeling and too many deeply personal, elusive intangibles; there really are no substantive musings I could venture. I simply love this band and the musical space that only they occupy.

No other band sounds like The Promise Ring (and that includes Maritime, their next incarnation, which is much more the spiritual successor to the intensely matured and absolute departure of sound that is the final TPR album, Wood/Water, than anything else they did prior to it). The band got lumped into the catch-all descriptor of second-wave emo, despite most of their catalogue sounding like music to accompany excitedly jumping up and down while clapping with glee, or at least find yourself unconsciously, bouncily tapping along to. It’s not so much poppy as peppy, though it’s got layers and a strange sort of intensity that makes it less vapidly fun and more fully, catchily realized.

But TPR is largely just happy-sounding music to me; whether or not the lyrics always match that feeling is irrelevant. Their oeuvre is just fun to listen to, and that’s what made the surly emo high school version of me fall madly in love with this band that made music wholly incongruous with the stuff I gravitated to.

I’ve listened to both Very Emergency and “The Deep South” a lot these past few weeks, and I had forgotten how The Promise Ring does that thing where the whole album fits together and flows so well that it’s hard for me to glom onto any one song (aside from a few notable exceptions from their beautifully raw, charmingly unpolished debut, 30° Everywhere) and identify it as a standout reason to love this band. Every album is so cohesive and intuitively arranged that every track feels more like a crucial piece of an even greater whole than individual parts, though these songs all sure as hell stand just fine on their own.

And this track is one of those times when a song is less about itself and more about the band it brings screaming back to the forefront as it sinks its teeth into my earballs and brings an avalanche of forgotten fondness along with it. I love this song and I loved it when The Promise Ring was still in the present tense, but in this particular instance, I love it for being a stand-in for something bigger and a reintroduction to something dearly loved.

“The Deep South” sucked me back into TPR’s catalogue, which would have been nicely complemented by a local brewery’s alcoholic tribute to Very Emergency via the first line of its first track if hadn’t sold out by the time I’d finally heard about it. Or if any of my usual booze-slinging merchants carried the fruits of a nearby craft brewer. Meh, at least it made its way to the band’s frontman.