Empire! Empire! (I was a Lonely Estate) took a novel approach promoting their second full-length album, ‘You Will Eventually be Forgotten’. In the months before the album’s release, each track’s lyrics were posted on their Facebook page. As one of the flagship bands of the so-called emo “revival” (continuation), they garnered considerable attention. Firstly, before the album even came out, fans of the Michigan-based husband-and-wife duo were dissecting lines and deciphering their meanings. Secondly, and more crucially, this highlighted the significance of lyrics to the band. The removal of any musical excess from their last record is further testament to this. Empire! Empire! still play an achingly gorgeous style of emo/indie-rock pitched between the tenderness of Mineral and the wistful beauty of American Football, only this time it is much more concise, pushing Keith Latinen’s lyrics to the forefront.
All of this portrayed ‘You Will Eventually Be Forgotten’ as something of a “concept” album. However, this term should be used with caution – ‘You Will Eventually Be Forgotten’ feels too organic for that label. Nevertheless, certain messages and themes (love, death, family, youth, maturity) feature recurrently. The last line of the opening track, ‘Ribbon’, “the scrapes and bruises only made you more beautiful” sets the album up nicely; ‘You Will Eventually Be Forgotten’ spends the next thirty-five minutes detailing various ‘scrapes’ and ‘bruises’: car-crashes, near-death experiences, and actual deaths of loved ones. The album’s gentle narratives are clear and direct, and though description and detail are proffered only sparingly, there is still enough for these tales to feel wholly specific and personal. They feel real. Therefore, it is unsurprising that they frequently stumble across moments of profundity. Through their modest stories, Empire! Empire! capture something of the beauty of life.
There is a quiet yet tangible sense of awe at the heart of ‘You Will Eventually Be Forgotten.’ Ostensibly unremarkable events (a family camping trip, spring break with friends, attending a “second-rate carnival”) become settings for life-altering moments, comings-of-age and atheistic epiphanies. On ‘Foxfire’ Latinen recounts his acceptance of atheism whilst away at college – a friend who “used logic like a hammer or a martyr” eventually “absolved (him) of any last remaining doubt”. He ultimately affirms his lack of faith, declaring his comfort in “knowing that this is it”. This declaration is markedly more reassuring than his worried assertion on the bleakly-titled ‘I Was Somewhere Cold, Dark… And Lonely’ that after a near-fatal car-crash (his) “life did not flash before his eyes”. Instead, this central belief – that this is it – makes the ordinary events he describes more special.
It is perhaps fitting then, that musically, ‘You Will Eventually Be Forgotten’ is modestly understated. Empire! Empire!’s arpeggiated lullabies and soft, poignant melodies rarely divert attention away from Latinen’s vocals. Rather, they tend to provide a gentle, pretty backdrop for each set of lyrics. The serene guitar refrains and languorously tumbling drums in the first half of ‘You Have to Be So Much Better than You Ever Thought’, for example, match the tranquillity Latinen felt at being in a camp that felt “as if the rest of the world had disappeared”. There are few stand-alone musical sections on the album – primarily, its job is to complement the lyrics. An exception is made for the trumpet outro of ‘A Keepsake’, however, this could also be seen as the ‘punctuation’, as it were, at the end of the storyline.
Musically then, ‘You Will Eventually Be Forgotten’ is exceptionally lean – almost anaemically so. Pretty melodies dance their way through proceedings, but rarely rise above Keith Latinen’s vocals. They are not so much in harmony with them, as they are of secondary importance – they provide a gentle, serene platform for Latinen’s plainly-worded narratives. Their quiet beauty is the key to the album. The album’s title evokes the concept of time passing and of moments of transition – from youth to maturity, from acquaintance to love, from blind faith to contented disbelief, and ultimately, from life to death. These themes are captured simply and beautifully on ‘You Will Eventually Be Forgotten’. After all, “there is so much more beauty in a life that also has death”.