Rosy Overdrive reviews Broken Hearts Are Blue

Thanks to Rosy Overdrive for the kind words about Broken Hearts Are Blue’s remastered The Truth About Love:

Like many emo bands who formed around the same time, Broken Hearts Are Blue’s initial run was brief but eventful. The story’s a not-unfamiliar one–a group forms in the mid-90s in a mid-sized college town (Kalamazoo, Michigan), records one album (1997’s The Truth About Love), and is already broken up by the time it gets formally released. Their album came out on emo artifact Caulfield Records, which put out music from Mineral, Christie Front Drive, and Giants Chair before (like many emo labels who formed around the same time) shuttering in the early 2000s. Vocalist/lyricist Ryan Gage, guitarist Charles Wood, bassist Daniel Buettner, and drummer Derek Brosch scattered across the United States but reformed as a long-distance collaboration in the mid-2010s–they’ve actually put out three new albums since 2018, including last March’s Meeting Themselves. Although it might not have the full-on cult classic designation of some of their contemporaries, there definitely seems to still be an affection for the record that started it all–The Truth About Love got a limited vinyl reissue shortly after Broken Hearts Are Blue reformed in 2018, and it’s recently been remastered and is seeing its first-ever cassette release in 2024.

90s or “second-wave” emo is a lot more varied and unpredictable than its reputation suggests, so when I say that The Truth About Love sounds right out of that scene, that certainly doesn’t mean it’s interchangeable with any given Braid or Texas Is the Reason LP. Broken Hearts Are Blue are energetic on The Truth About Love and they’re frequently messy, but they’re not exactly “punk” and nowhere close to “hardcore” whatsoever. The louder songs on the record feel like marathons, pushing their way across amped-up, frantic, but weirdly sturdy foundations, while the quieter ones feel like mazes, the quartet soundtracking Gage’s vocals with a measured dirge that feels lost but hardly aimless. The Truth About Love is gripping from “Because I Am”, a song that doesn’t burn everything down so much as leave a nice scorch mark on the album, and “Get’n Over My Sassy Self” (whose title sounds like one of those emo in-jokes that doesn’t actually get sung, but you’d better believe Gage actually does utter that phrase multiple times) continues forward by plodding purposefully. The workmanlike rocker “And Then” feels a bit out of place, almost like it’s the band’s apology for closing the record with two six-minute slow-burners and a two-minute acoustic epilogue. Of course, one doesn’t need to apologize for making a record with enough quirks and contours that we’re still here talking about it over a quarter-century later.