White Flight

Imagine playing guitar in an emo band at a time when the genre was defined by the likes of the Get Up Kids and Sunny Day Real Estate, before every store in the mall sold skinny black jeans. Then the emo bubble bursts, so now what? If you’re Justin Roelofs, formerly of the Anniversary, you form White Flight and start making music that is somewhere between psych-folk and hip-hop, which sounds impossible but is not. "Solarsphere” starts at a crawl and then bugs out with an emphatic chorus sung with a strained, pleading sort of quality. The hip-hop influence comes through best on "Obsidian,” which builds on an obvious hip-hop beat and features spoken lyrics; it’s hip-hop for the kids that hate hip-hop. Where there isn’t rapping or jazz-inflected horns, somewhere between the blissed-out jams, in the back of his vocals, straining and breaking is a little bit of old fashioned emo.