Album Review: Empire! Empire! (I Was A Lonely Estate) - You Will Eventually Be Forgotten

It begins with a car crash on a wedding day; it ends with a touring husband’s lament at the distance stretched between him, his wife and every sense of home. In between, there are tales of suburban sadness so poignantly penned and sincerely expressed as to speak to at least one fear — or hope — in us all.

Welcome to You Will Eventually Be Forgotten, the beautifully sad (and sadly beautiful) sophomore full-length from Fenton, Michigan-based emo revivalist super-musicians-slash-label-owners-slash-adorable-spouses Keith and Cathy Latinen, aka Empire! Empire! (I Was A Lonely Estate). That’s a pretty technical way to describe it, though — more expressively, it is far and away one of the most gorgeous albums we’ve seen released this year.

It’s been five years since Empire! Empire! (or EEIWALE, if you’re into brevity) released their now-seminal debut LP What It Takes To Move Forward, but that doesn’t mean they’ve been dormant - in fact, the pair are one of the hardest-working bands getting around, having released a prolific number of EPs/splits and the like in their time, so it comes as little surprise that You Will Eventually... has ended up so finely and delicately crafted a piece of work.

From the opening, minimalist strains of first track Ribbon, which contains the aforementioned car crash and wedding (in that order), singer-songwriter Keith paints a vivid, more-than-half-hour-long picture of awkward, innocent romance (We Are People Here. We Are Not Numbers), childhood experiences (A Keepsake, featuring the legendary Bob Nanna of Braid; You Have To Be So Much Better Than You Ever Thought), losing one’s faith (Foxfire), and other introspective symphonic stories of nostalgia, disappointment, and unshakeable, if still dimmable, optimism.

Latinen's free-flowing sense of lyricism is such a welcome departure from predictable phrasing or repetitive arrangements, using glistening, poetic techniques to make lengthy, sentence-like lyrics fit seamlessly into a swirling confluence of splashing cymbals and soaring guitars, dynamically shifting vocals, and a pervasive sense of beauty, right across the entire album.

Along the way, we're treated to such linguistically acrobatic gems as, "Do you know how two trees can grow together and become like one? When my grandmother died, my grandfather died too. It took two whole years to convince his body to let him go," which is simultaneously palpably more musical and tremendously sad to hear when strained through the aural explosions of (one) album highlight, It's So Much Darker When a Light Goes Out than It Would Have Been If It Had Never Shone, and a perfect example of the kinds of ways in which Latinen expertly bends and twists syllables and phrases to match the tunes.

By the time the bone-proximal lament of album closer The Promise That Life Can Go on No Matter How Bad Our Losses (which features another icon of the genre, Chris Simpson of Mineral, on guest vocals) fades out — aside from the immediate need to go and hug someone, anyone — you'll be reaching for the 'play' button again before your brain even realises what your body is doing.

As the band reflects in Foxfire, there may be more beauty in a life that also has death — but there is little chance of even that matching the appeal of a life that features You Will Eventually Be Forgotten, which truly stands out as a very real contender for album of the year, even with four months of 2014 to go.