One Toy Soldier

Emo is no more immune to the tides of changing mainstream tastes than any other music. Or perhaps it is fair to say it's less immune than other strands of punk—I don't think anyone would mistake emo, with its sheer variety, for being as unchanging as the stolid orthodoxy of hardcore punk. The 2000s saw the 90s pop punk boom gradually wane (though, like all music in the age of the internet, it never actually went away) and the rise of stripped-down garage rock, epitomized by The Strokes. This return-to-roots movement was supposed to bring back rock and roll to prominence, and I suppose it did, for a while. As Carissa's Wierd once sang, "I promise I'll make it in that hip-hop radio." But in the end, that hip-hop radio didn't change all that much. Which is fine, because the internet is going to kill it anyway.

Something similar was happening in the UK, and this is all a very roundabout way of posing the hypothetical: "What if a post-punk revival band was actually an emo band?" The answer is One Toy Soldier. They swing freely back and forth between choppy bursts of garage rock pop and pure emo aggression, topping it off with plenty of midwest emo. The end result is like if The Power of Failing-era Mineral covered Bloc Party's Silent Alarm. If that 2000s rock revival stuff isn't your cup of tea, try these guys out anyway. They're much more emo than not emo.

Besides the LP, they put out a 7" that has both its songs on the album. There's also an EP I found on Bandcamp, which seems to be a project that never saw a proper release; it sees their sound move away from emo and into their other influences, but I still really like it. The album, Concrete Smiles At The Midnight Hospital Diner, was released in 2005, the single in 2006, and the EP also in 2006.

One Toy Soldier Discography