Texas is The Reason
Do You Know Who You Are?

At the end of a five-year period marked by the explosion of the "emo" scene, one feels the need to look back for a moment and understand.
In 1996, a New York band formed by runaways from the sturdy local hardcore scene finally managed to put together their first full-length, after having released a self-titled EP the previous year that heralded new skies and earth. They are Texas Is The Reason, and the album is called Do You Know Who You Are?.

It's one of those albums that moves towards somewhere else, opening up new gaps and possibilities within a scene that for some was becoming too suffocating. It's an album that offers a greater accessibility (bordering on pop), without giving up on the fierce (post-) punk attitude. Songs like "Something To Forget," "Back And To The Left," and the memorable final crescendo of "A Jack With One Eye" well represent the convincing balance between hardcore vigor and indie pop-rock tunefulness on which the TITR's proposal is based.

The rigor of Texas Is The Reason is entirely aesthetic and existential: their lyrics speak of dissatisfactions, glimmers, misunderstandings, contradictions: and they do so by unfurling the added values of an emotional intensity and sincerity that become quintessential to the genre itself. The TITR pick up where Sunny Day Real Estate had veered off, driven towards prog-rock fascinations: their songwriting is direct and profound; the guitar impetus is controlled in the sense of greater expressive lyricism; the hardcore abrasiveness emerges episodically with deictic intentions, mimicking feelings through sudden accelerations and decelerations, abrupt attacks, subtle dissonances, and feedback that is also that of the soul, melodic lines that even in the brightest moments (Jack On The Spot) seem tinged with sinister nuances.

Garrett Klahn's distinctive timbre, described by some as a sort of Liam Gallagher of the indie scene, does the rest, and reveals something unusual, as does the album's title (the last words of John Lennon before being killed): that somewhere, in every hardcore musician, there is an underlying attraction to the great lesson of catchiness and melody of English pop-rock, from the Beatles onwards. And Texas Is The Reason must be credited with being among the first to bring it out and develop it.