The End of Julia - Sunday Driver

Here's about what we know for sure: The End of Julia were a four piece emo band from Tyler, Texas. Tyler is named for former president John Tyler, and is colloquially known as the "Rose Capital of America" for boasting the largest rose garden in the country. That seems about as natural a breeding ground for an emo band as any.

I found out about The End of Julia trawling through Sophie's Floorboard*, where my general strategy is: click on a cool sounding name, double check that the description seems like something I'm interested in, and then download at least one release. The description compared The End of Julia to Pop Unknown; one thing about me is that I fucking love Pop Unknown. There was only one full length, 1999's Sunday Driver. Easy decision.

*Since this is the second Sophie's Floorboard mention I'll do a quick primer. It's basically a giant repository of punk/emo/hardcore/etc. that's--as far as I'm aware--run entirely by one person. You can browse by artist and there are Mediafire or Mega links with mp3s. I guess I can't imagine how you'd end up here without already knowing this, but another thing about me is that I love contextualizing shit.

The first thing that struck me was how sun-baked the whole record sounds. I tend to reach for a lot of the snottier, more chug-heavy 90s and 00s emo in the warmer months, but even by those standards there is something especially humid about the tinny guitars and multi-tracked vocals here. It's as if the band is fighting to play these songs through dense swamp air.

I was also intrigued by the band's fixation with time. The lyrics are awash with pining for a person far away, or fears that a goodbye may be final, or praying for the chance to see a loved one again. All emo bands yearn, so this isn't groundbreaking stuff. But it did get me to think about changing modes of lyricism within the genre. On "The Blue Period" they** sing, "It's 4a.m. in Paris/The air is rising thick/Did it ever occur to you that I'd wait forever?" In 1999, the object of your desire being in Paris while you remain stateside constituted a materially different spatial relationship at the turn of the century than it would today. Landlines, collect calls, no real internet--this person may as well not exist.

**The vague antecedent here isn't a mistake. I have no idea what the band members' names or roles are. This Bandcamp purports to have credits but I can't find a corroborating source. We here at Tributary must maintain some level of journalistic standard in the Post-Truth™️ era.

Today, of course, you have WhatsApp, WiFi, Instagram, everything. You can track someone and communicate, which is both reassuring and also anxiety inducing. My roommate is in Europe for the month and we were functionally able to look for an apartment together, which would seem like a feat of either relentless determination or outright wizardry to a denizen of the 90s. This has led to new modes of lyricism, to wit: songs that make explicit reference to our constant interconnectedness. Has it also eliminated the very specific strain of pre-Online yearning that The End of Julia were so good at? Maybe not, but whatever shape it takes now probably looks pretty different.

In any case, I've listened to this album a ton over the years and would probably consider it an all-time favorite at this point. Please enjoy their cover of The Cure, one of the only two other recordings they ever released.

Recommendation Corner:

READ:

Mark Asch "Grave New World: A Conversation with David Cronenberg on The Shrouds" - kind of Trojan Horsing in a movie recommendation with this one, but I watched The Shrouds when it premiered on Criterion this week and found it deeply moving and incredibly funny. I read this interview shortly after and think it adds a lot

WATCH:

The Grapes of Death (dir. Jean Rollin 1978) - from the title I assumed this would be silly, perverted schlock horror, but in reality it was moody, rather nightmarish, and fairly romantic. 4/5 grapes, catch it on Tubi