The first La Dispute album I heard was 2014’s Rooms of the House, which constructs a fictional group history that interconnects time and location. In an interview with Noisey’s Mischa Pearlman, frontman and lyricist Jordan Dreyer says he aimed to “capture the way that objects retain history and a shared memory and can kind of create this sort of time travel when you consider them.” Struggling with writer’s block, Dreyer and a close friend went to thrift stores in his hometown and selected objects that looked like they had history. In the same interview, he says: “we cleared out a whole room in [my parent’s] house and we spent some time arranging these objects and taking pictures, partly to document the process but also trying to delve deeper and get myself out of that funk.” Some objects, those that were found in the family’s attic storage, were more directly personal, but as the story became a meld of fictionalized experience and Michigan history, the line between personal and found objects began to shape a new narrative. The meaning became less about the direct memory of the object and, perhaps, where it was from or who it once belonged to, but about what it could mean, sentimentally, to a person.
In the early months of 2019, I was on a family trip to celebrate my father’s retirement. He wanted to go, with the entire family (and our partners), back to Hawaii, where I’d spent my teenage years. It was, for him, one of the last times he felt we could be together in a place that was sentimentally special for him. He had served in the US Navy, for a short time, in Hawaii. He was married there once. And we returned for about five years starting in 2001. For me, despite being a tropical vacation, in a way that I’d never really travelled before, it was still a place filled with teenage memories. Some good – like when, with the encouragement of a much older friend, I played my first show as a solo industrial musician before a popular dance night. You could smoke inside then, and bars didn’t have an age limit to attend, so the room was mostly filled with friends sneaking drinks under the tables. But some memories were bad – like when I decided being asleep on the wrong bus was better than sleeping at the Ala Moana bus station and ended up on the other side of the island from where we lived. The bus driver woke me up and said he was leaving and I could stay if I wanted, but it would be another hour before the next route started. I can quickly recall the deep loneliness I felt then, smelling like old cigarettes and beer, wearing a trenchcoat and torn fishnets. Faded eyeliner. Tired, but unable to sleep for more than a few minutes.
As we drove through the center of the island – along freeway cutting through green mountain rifts – from the commercial, tourist-heavy Honolulu to the smaller towns of the North Shore, I could only think of one band who could embody what I was experiencing. At once, nearly equally: regret, history, beauty, and a sense that I was, and have been for a long time, in a much better place. Older now, it seemed that I was more sentimental about the way this place lived in my history than I thought. In the Noisey interview, Dreyer says, “I’m a really sentimental person which makes packing things up pretty difficult. So there was this time period of picking things up and suddenly being 18 again or in a different location or remembering something I had always planned on doing and never got around to.” This resonated through all the songs in the La Dispute discography to me all at once. From Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair when Dreyer says:
“I think you saw me confronting my fear, it went up with a bottle and went down with the beer, and I think you ought to stay away from here. There are ghosts in the walls and they crawl in your head through your ear,”
to Here, Here. III when, as if lost in memory, Dreyer speaks far from the listener: “I should’ve stopped to paint our picture. Captured honest pure affection. Just to document the difference between attraction and connection,” or in Panorama, as the narrator reflects on death, when we hear: “[I] never needed to live and suffer through the pain; all the tyrannies of grief. If I ever do, will I even have the strength to do anything?”
Rooms of the House is the kind of tragedy that embodies most family histories. Small tragedies that shape the way a group of people splinter or stay together. From the first track, where a storm crashes through Terre Haute, Indiana, separating a family from each other to “Woman (In Mirror)” where a house is being put together for the first time. Moving in. Creating new sentimental space.
“In the bathroom, off the kitchen, leave the door ajar in a brand new dress. Let me watch, put your makeup on. let me in, give me holy privileges. There’s a dinner thing, Thanksgiving. Dress up nice, make a dish to bring. There are moments here, only yours and mine. Tiny dots on an endless timeline. All the motions of ordinary love.”
Listening to the sad songs in La Dispute’s discography, I told myself: remember this. Allow yourself to reflect and miss it. Let in all the things that you’ve kept out for so many years. Growing up, making mistakes. Write it all down, be honest.
I was quiet for a lot of that trip. An hour at a time in the car, I sat in the backseat trying not to fully disconnect from the experiences we were having as a family, together. There were roosters in the streets. It rained nearly every morning as the sun came up. I sat on the porch with my father reading, trying to imagine what it was like to have two adult sons and be in the early days of retiring from a job I’d held for forty years. In AirBnB’s it’s easy to see yourself outside of your space because nothing in the house is yours. You have luggage, you have the things you could fit in the car, but nothing else. I don’t remember the objects in the houses we stayed in, but I remember finishing a book early in the morning when everyone else was asleep. Not knowing what else to do I laid and listened until the rain stopped. Palm fronds in the wind.
When I tell people about La Dispute, I try to tell them about the writing. But the writing isn’t alone. The writing is good – it’s thoughtful in a way I feel is deeper than a lot of bands, even in the screamo/hardcore genre, which tends to be ripe with emotional vulnerability. The music is made to fit the lyrics so well. It has to be. The emotions are only as strong as the soundtrack behind them, and the soundtrack is only expressed through words at times. Silence comes – quiet strumming of the guitar, a tiny organ, a trumpet – and the lyrics drive the scene. But sometimes it feels so loud that the words don’t make sense. They scatter, as the music becomes frenetic and the tempo changes, embodying the way a moment in your life can shift quickly, maybe when you least expect it. From sitting quietly alone with a notebook to screaming at the top of your lungs in a storm, the visceral nature of the album is expertly crafted to reach the realities of existence.
I believe Rooms of the House is the most thematically consistent album La Dispute has put out to date. Panorama, which is their most recent album, has a more consistent tone and musical arc – the songs flow through an ethereal environment, presenting moments as reflections and questions instead of histories. But if I had to start someone out on their discography, I would choose Rooms of the House because I think if you sit with it, and let it in, you’ll find the kind of reflection that makes art in this form personal. The stories are not your stories. The emotions are not your emotions. But they could be.
La Dispute’s discography is available on Bandcamp.