Certainly "emo" as a label isn't being used left and right to describe music these days, not like it used to be in the early 2000s, the days of Brand New, Taking Back Sunday and the rest of the big wave of punky-poppy rock bands who liked to play touchy-feely with their guitars, worrying about their rich looks and battling each other for air time on the dying regarding music platform that MTV had become. Of course the whole thing had a very decent start in the face of acts like Jawbreaker and Weezer, but a decade and a half later the genre had malformed to an overly exaggerated version of what it started as.
"Emo" still gets thrown around though, even to this day, to describe bands like Touché Amoré, The World Is A Beautiful Place... and Pity Sex, who have recently released the follow up to their very well received 2013 album, Feast Of Love. The big three letter word may have lost its 2000s impact, but it's still vaild and fortunately it has reclaimed some of its former dignity, so that bands shouldn't be ashamed of it anymore.
White Hot Moon is not much different than Feast Of Love. Its produced by Will Yip sound may be slightly more refined than the past, but the punky angst is still present and it's remarkably married to the band's romanticism and their skillful ability to craft pop songs to tell stories about feelings, about love, about the lost art of being sentimental.
White Hot Moon doesn't break any new grounds, but it is worth of all the attention it can get and on the way it picks up the pieces of a broken genre and helps the process of assembling again.
Vinyl, cassette, CD etc. via Run For Cover
AJC