If you haven’t sung along to “Car Underwater” by Armor For Sleep when they play it live then you truly haven’t lived. And that’s precisely what I got to do with a few hundred other elder Emo millenials this past Tuesday out at an apple farm in the middle of nowhere (or Lafayette NY for those fancy types).
For thirty minutes we were transported back in time to the early 2000s when a concept album about a ghost following around his ex-girlfriend after he drowned himself was a perfectly normal storyline. (Nowadays it would likely be more complicated and dramatic and involve social media, probably Tik Tok. You can’t just have a simple “I want to be a ghost and nicely stalk my ex” mindset anymore. You’d end up having Zak Bagans yell at you and ask you to chuck him thru the air to prove you exist.)
The venue was an apple farm smack dab in the middle of central New York down in the valley by Syracuse, it was seriously one of the most picturesque venues I’ve been at. Right as golden hour seemed to spread over the valley, Armor for Sleep took to the stage. They played fan favorites like “The Truth About Heaven”, “Remember to Feel Real” and “My Town”. They also played a single off their upcoming full-length, The Rain Museum, their first release in fifteen years.
Another concept album, The Rain Museum, is about built around a post-apocalyptic world where weather no longer exists on planet earth and people come to a mysterious museum in the middle of the desert to look back on what life used to be like. Originally planned to be the follow-up to What To Do When You Are Dead, it was shelved and waited patiently for its time to shine. Vocalist Ben Jorgensen explained that it was an album “about facing some of the most painful parts of being human and how lost we can get. I just hope it will speak to people going through their own dark times, as my favorite art certainly helped me get through mine.”
To close out their set for the night, they finished off with the perfect emo singalong one-two punch of “Dream to Make Believe” and their seminal emo anthem “Car Underwater”.
