Page "Drive Like Jehu" Paragraph 7

Drive Like Jehu's music is often classified as post-hardcore, alternative rock, and emo.

Steve Huey of Allmusic calls them " arguably the most progressive of the leading post-hardcore bands: their lengthy, multisectioned compositions were filled with odd time signatures, orchestrated builds and releases, elliptical melodies, and other twists and turns that built on the innovations of the Dischord label.

The result was one of the most distinctive and ferocious sounds in the loosely defined post-hardcore movement.

" Next to contemporaries such as Fugazi and Quicksand, Drive Like Jehu was sometimes overlooked and their music was sometimes difficult for critics to place in a broader context.

According to Huey, the band was influential to the development of emo even though the style's later sound was quite different from Drive Like Jehu's: " The term ' emo ' hadn't yet come into wider use, and while Drive Like Jehu didn't much resemble the sound that word would later come to signify, they exerted a powerful pull on its development.

Moreover, they did fit the earlier definition of emo: challenging, intricate guitar rock rooted in hardcore and performed with blistering intensity, especially the frenzied vocals.

" Allmusic's Ned Raggett also commented on the emo connection in his review of Yank Crime: " Perhaps even more than the debut, Yank Crime solidified Drive Like Jehu's reputation as kings of emo.

While use of that term rapidly degenerated to apply to sappy miserableness by the decade's end, here the quartet capture its original sense: wired, frenetic, screaming passion, as first semi-created by the likes of Rites of Spring.

" Brendan Reid of Pitchfork Media also notes that " It's often easy to forget that DLJ were considered emo in their day ; Froberg's howls of ' Ready, ready to let you in!

' on ' Super Unison ' seem like a sick parody of stylish vulnerability.

Then the song mutates into a gorgeous, snare-drum rolling open sea, and everything you've ever liked ( and still like ) about this genre in its purest form comes flooding back.