On the recommendation of Jordan from the OzProg forums, I trundled over to the La Dispute MySpace page expecting to hear a band "a lot like mewithoutYou with a bit of skramz influence". mewithoutYou are in my top five bands of the past decade and I vividly remember gasping like an excited school girl when my girlfriend announced to me that they were playing Soundwave in 2007, so that's a tough recommendation to live up to.
But if anything, right now, La Dispute have one up on mewithoutYou.
The OzProg recommendation came a couple of weeks before La Dispute toured Australia – an astounding occurrence when you consider that not only does the band not have a Wikipedia page, but when someone did create one it got deleted for non-notability.
I went to their show in Melbourne at what looked like some kind of former clothing warehouse converted into a communal squat. I felt massively old-school punk, turning up to a show in an abandoned warehouse to see an underground American band, and the cross-section of people at the show was just amazing. Every single scene was represented and the dirty electric atmosphere was intoxicating as I tried to push myself and my girlfriend into the tiny corner room in which the band had set up.
There would have been room for 50 people to stand comfortably and watch the band, but there was easily 200 in the room and another 100 outside trying to get in. The band started and I swear, in nearly ten years of going to concerts, I have never seen a more rabid crowd. To a person they were all shouting along at the top of their lungs, throwing sweaty fists in the air, spilling onto the stage and knocking over band members. It was chaos, and I loved it.
Jordan had the right idea with his description: La Dispute have a lot in common with mewithoutYou, epecially the strange half-spoken half-screamed vocal style and poetic lyrics, but La Dispute fit more squarely in the screamo category than do mewithoutYou. The guitar work is especially fanastic, and I'd love one day to see the song "Said the King to the River" in a Guitar Hero game. I would never put it down.
But despite the hardcore influence the majority of Vega and Altair is very melodic and is certainly not harsh to listen to at all. My girlfriend, who hates most hardcore and has spent most of the past three days listening to the Glee soundtrack, also enjoys La Dispute's music.
mewithoutYou currently lead by virtue of the fact that they have one more high-quality release than La Dispute, but Vega and Altair is more consistently good than even Brother, Sister, my favourite mwY album.
