Faceplant Welcome Change with Open Arms

The members of Faceplant, from left to right: Sam Oxford, Nate Schreyer, Ryan Watson

When we sit down to eat, Faceplant’s lead guitarist, Nate Schreyer, starts brushing his teeth with salt and asks if I’ve ever watched anime. Clearly in his element, he tells a story of lead vocalist Ryan Watson’s rise to fame as a “Crazy Train”-covering, mohawk-sporting “child punk icon” as Watson grins and tries to change the topic. Sam Oxford, the band’s bassist, sits between them, offering both anecdotes about his long hair and a middle ground between Watson’s good-natured reticence and Schreyer’s uninhibited comfort.

If it weren’t for his soft-spoken confidence and almost musically deep voice, it would be difficult to pick out Watson from a crowd as the lead vocalist of an emo band. Where Oxford’s much-past-shoulder-length hair and Godspeed You! Black Emperor shirt and Schreyer’s ripped-to-the-elbows flannel give them away immediately, Watson is inconspicuously wearing a Westminster high school shirt and basketball shorts, with an easy smile seemingly fixed on his face.

Watson and Schreyer met in sixth grade, when, according to Schreyer, “I was sitting on the other side of the room and I heard Ryan play ‘Eruption’ by Van Halen and I thought, ‘I know what this is!’”. Of course, no one’s music taste remains static after sixth grade, but Faceplant make music so far removed from Van Halen’s jock rock it’s almost unbelievable that that scene helped bring about the band’s existence. Abandoning glam rock and guitar tapping, however, was just one step in the band’s evolution, one that seems more defined by change than by constants.

Throughout their history, Faceplant have shapeshifted through, in Ryan’s words, “pop punk, chaotic hardcore, emo,” a list of adjacent genres that gives little credit to the band’s immense artistic growth over the years. Faceplant’s process of adopting disparate and usually immiscible styles seems to have come as no surprise to the band: Watson describes this development as “natural aging…discovering new bands and deciding, I want to do that. Impulsive decisions.” 

Even comparing Faceplant’s excellent July release, West of Elysium, to the LP that preceded it, 2018’s (also great) The Great Indifference, feels unfair. AlthoughThe Great Indifference features its fair share of experiments, they often feel like tweaks on a canonical emo formula. West of Elysium, on the other hand, takes cues from a dizzying array of genres and media, to such an extent that nearly any characterization of the album’s sound feels inadequate.

Between these two albums, Schreyer started school at Temple University—meaning most of the album was written by “texting and calling each other,” according to Watson—and Oxford replaced Faceplant’s previous drummer. When I ask about the loss that underpins much of West Elysium, it is this loss that comes up first: “On the last album we were working with a different drummer who we had been with since the start of our band…[He was our] close friend and he started to drift away from us after the new album since it was a different sound from what he wanted,” says Watson.

Schreyer adds, “I think we all lost someone—we lost a friend, I lost a family member. We lost Kyoto Animations.”

On the lost friend, Oxford clarifies: “I think he attempted to fake his death and it failed, but we didn’t know [that it was fake] at all…that was my first experience with human death, so that was my first time facing that, and it turned out to be a fake one.”

Although none of the loss on West of Elysium centers a tangible death, the album often fixates on very real feelings of loss. The disorientation brought on by the splintering of an integral friendship and the death-and-then-not-death of a friend are felt throughout the album, and Faceplant make no attempt to hide this. 

Artwork by Lilly Price

As Schreyer taps a drumbeat on the table with his now-used toothbrush and Oxford waits for his pizza to cool enough to eat, I name mewithoutYou, a band whose fingerprints felt inescapable upon my first listening of West of Elysium. Watson, amazingly, says, “None of us have listened to them, actually.”

Also, amazingly, this response wasn’t even that deflating. Throughout my review for West of Elysium I wrote of supposed influences and topics that hadn’t even entered Faceplant’s collective conscious, and throughout the interview I excitedly bring up those points. Rather than the (very reasonable) response of confusion and condescension I might otherwise expect, the bandmembers found only gratitude and appreciation for an unintended interpretation.

Faceplant’s inspirations, instead, are much less obvious than the ones a single-minded music writer might be looking for. When I mention “You Moved On”, for example, Watson pokes fun at the Schreyer-written arrangement, saying, “Nate just ripped ‘You Moved On’ from the Dark Souls menu theme.” 

“There is a point where I am playing the Dark Souls menu theme song,” admits Schreyer, “but it’s only for two measures…I wrote that song after my second play-through and I got really emotionally attached to [the game].”

“The Empty City”, also written by Schreyer, similarly takes cues from sources far outside the couple at the song’s center:

“That song [The Empty City] was a love letter to the city of Philadelphia, and also a little bit of Tokyo. I just wanted to make a song that felt like how both of those cities make me feel…Naoko Yamada, [an anime director], said that she wanted her art to be like standing at the entrance to the universe. All of her stuff is about making human connections. All of her stuff makes you value every breath and gesture and footstep that characters take. Standing at the entrance of the universe—that’s a scary feeling, but it’s simultaneously really empowering. That’s how Philly makes me feel.” (Although Philadelphia may not be my first choice for places that feel like standing at the entrance to the universe, Schreyer’s unabashed enthusiasm is infectious.)

Oxford, meanwhile, conceived “Threads That Bind” as a manifestation of the existential fear of losing sight of happiness, saying, “I think I wrote [“Threads That Bind”] after I read Our Town…my interpretation was, ‘dude, if you don’t try to change anything, your life is going to be really boring.’ I thought it was really tragic that they only had one day that matters: the wedding. And then she dies…That’s heartbreaking. I don’t want my life to come down to two days.”

“Threads That Bind”, with its subject “putting [their] corpse to bed” and watching “as graying hairs arrive to [their] head,” feels like the natural conclusion to that lack of purpose, an aimlessness the members of Faceplant seem to be doing everything in their power to avoid.

Of the three, Watson seems to have taken most inspiration from the musical canon, explaining that both the album’s title and the gorgeous coda of “Nothing, Nowhere, No One” drew inspiration from the R.E.M. song “West of the Fields”. When Watson begins describing his goal for the song—a loose idea of being adjacent to the promised land—Schreyer clarifies:

“That’s not how I interpreted it at all…how [Watson] pitched it was more like an unobtainable perfection. Something really beautiful that’s just out of reach.”

“That’s about it,” Watson concurs. 

Later, Watson adds another source of inspiration to Faceplant’s already-diverse pool: “My main inspiration for this album was Pet Sounds,” he says; “every time I’d listen to that album I’d write a new song.”

Neil Young and Jason Isbell, two artists squarely outside the territory typically occupied by emo music, also come up in conversation. Fittingly, Watson wonders aloud, “Our music, is it all that emo anymore?” (after some deliberation, Oxford responds, “Nah, but you just write kind of emo lyrics.”)

So, although the only single genre that seems to adequately describe Faceplant’s sound is “emo,” that term is unsatisfying—minimizing, even—for a band that so willingly steps outside that genre’s limits. When I ask about the current state of emo, Schreyer gives some insight into why that label feels arbitrary: “There are too many emo artists that are influenced only by emo artists…everything that’s cool about emo gets filtered through like five different bands.”

Emo music, for all its now-incestuous internal relations, was conceived with an ethos of emotional connection and expression; it is this ideology, rather than emo’s stagnancy, that Faceplant seem to have taken to heart. “Emo” fits Faceplant’s music not because West of Elysium feels like an American Football retread (as so many modern emo albums do), but because the members of Faceplant share so openly with the world.

Late in our conversation, as a way of admitting he’s not quite sure where the band will go next, Schreyer says, “We make music because we want to communicate with people and express what we can’t express with words, so this album sounds like my brain and my brain still sounds like West of Elysium.” This earnestness is deeply appreciated in a genre whose vulnerability can so often feel forced or overwrought; Watson, Schreyer, and Oxford all appear wholly dedicated to sharing a conversation with their audience rather than dominating it.

“We need to live a little bit before the next one, make some new memories,” Schreyer says after some thought. “Maybe I’ll become a blacksmith.”