The Busy World

 The Busy World were a midwest emo band from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. For their biography, I will let the band speak for themselves:

"The Busy World was a band formed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 2004 and continued to play shows until 2009 when they recorded and released their highly unanticipated album–Large Bodies of Water–to a very busy public. Coming of age in a local scene anchored by hometown heroes like the Scaries and the Prayers & Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers, the boys in the Busy World desperately wanted to sound like Mineral with Anathallo lyrics. They largely fell short of this not entirely unreachable goal.

Not sure quite what else to do, the Busy World took to practicing and playing shows. I mean, they played anywhere—student venues, libraries, lawns, library lawns, chapels, battles of the bands, wherever they could—sometimes even just across state lines—because there are no VFW Halls in North Carolina. And, of course, they were regulars at Chapel Hill’s tiniest venues—all the way up until their album’s release show, which doubled as their final/farewell show. Feeling fairly well-attended, that show might have suggested a musical precipice on which The Busy World could have potentially once stood.

It all started the first time Andrew and Mark played guitars together in the basement of a place they called the Overlook. It wasn’t quite the Clarity-era Jimmy Eat World meets Photo Album-era Death Cab for Cutie at a party at Something to Write Home About-era Get Up Kids’ parents’ house sound that Andrew had always wanted, but it was better than the Jesus Freak-era DC Talk sound Andrew had been making with the local church kids up until then.

It took Andy joining on bass, Paul on drums, and Dave on accordion to get TBW sounding better than their lowest hopes could have expected. In those days, man, did they practice. The same 10 songs once a week, first at the Overlook, then in a cluttered room above the garage at Paul’s parents’ house, and finally at JaMax in Hillsborough. Four years of that turned the Busy boys into a well-honed machine. 10 years, 10 songs. That was the formula they learned from I Hate Myself and they stuck to it.

The band broke up the day after their album release show, with members moving to different and distant parts of the world. They tried their dead-level best to show that mid-90s emo wasn't dead in Central North Carolina, but alas, it was."

I think the band are a bit hard on themselves in terms of realizing their ambitions. Their first and only album was released in 2009, right as the emo revival was kicking into gear with the first releases from Snowing, Algernon Cadwallader, and others. If The Busy World had been signed one of the labels associated with the revival, I think they'd be better known, especially since their take on the emo revival eschews the focus on the Kinsella sound typically associated with the movement in favor of Mineral, putting them in the rarer company of bands like Empire! Empire! and Joie De Vivre. In my opinion, you can never have too many bands trying to sound like Mineral, and what we do have is precious few. If The Busy World were out of step with the emo of their time, it's only because they were doing such a good job of replicating a different set of sounds from the 90s.

Besides their 2009 album, Large Bodies of Water, the band released a 2006 EP, The Secret In The Old Attic, which is mostly comprised of earlier versions of album tracks. There are also a variety of demos, two of which are unique from the album.

The Busy World Discography