Cute is what we aim for is a band from emo’s mid-2000s boom, when any kids who met in high school and had long hair were getting signed to Fueled By Ramen after Blink-182 and Fall Out Boy and a handful of other bands made good enough for there to be a run on groups that might be able to cash in on a hit album or two. Their name is clunky and embarrassing, but it’s mostly because they listened to too many emo albums that had exhaustingly long song titles and thought they’d cut out the middleman. They weren’t as endearing and fun as some of the other mid-2000s bands. Hellogoodbye also had a corny name, but at least they had the good sense to play synthesizers and bring beach balls to their concerts. That particular era of emo was all about kids who were self-aware enough to know that they were the joke. Cute Is What We Aim For pretended to think they were the joke, but they seemed to want to be taken seriously with their sprawling songs about heartbreak and distance. Their first album, 2006’s The Same Old Blood Rush with a New Touch, had no depth and felt entirely contrived, like a band trying on a bunch of clothes that someone told them they should be wearing, even though all of the shirts are too big. Still, I sang along to “Curse of Curves” at enough house parties in 2006 to make the record a worthwhile purchase in the sea of emo albums that flooded the summer of 2006, but were forgotten by winter.
After another album, a handful of lineup shuffles, and a lengthy hiatus, Cute Is What We Aim For returned in the summer of 2016 to tour, playing the full Same Old Blood Rush album in its entirety, honoring its tenth anniversary. This was an odd choice, and felt explicitly like an attempt at a money grab. The album carried no memorable hits, peaked at a meager #75 on the charts, and was critically panned. Still, my fascination getting the best of me (and my deeply uninterested partner out of town), I made the trip to see them when they came through Hamden, Connecticut, a college town filled with early-20s kids who, in most cases, wouldn’t be able to pick the band out of a lineup. The venue, which I entered about ten minutes before show time, was close to barren.
The problem with Same Old Blood Rush is the problem with a lot of emo albums from its era, and why most emo bands don’t drag out their old albums in their entirety. One of the first lines you hear on the album is: “in every circle of friends there’s a whore,” courtesy of the song “Newport Living,” and the album builds around a single common theme: bitterness, most commonly aimed at an imagined woman who has wronged the band in some way. This is a common trope in all music, of course, but it took on a more visceral tone in the second and third waves of emo. In the early 2000s, the first albums by bands like Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, and Fall Out Boy, while stunning in many ways, also acted as revenge fantasy. The theme, in these albums and beyond, revolved around summoning “the girl,” and then wishing for ill to befall her as a punishment for heartbreak. Punishment rarely doled out by the man dreaming it up, but by some other circumstance: a car crash, choking on a meal, being attacked by an animal. It was, for me, very in the moment—something that I did myself in my teens from behind the security of a keyboard or behind a pen. It’s in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.
Same Old Blood Rush takes this approach, but with less direct and explicit violence, and more of an angle that feels like the band is in a high school hallway, spreading rumors about the girl who slept with them and didn’t call the next day. This leads to incessant binary moral judgements based more on gender than actual judgements. The hook before the first chorus in “Newport Living” is “If you lie, you don’t deserve to have friends,” repeated on loop. “Curse of Curves” bemoans attractive women who just can’t keep up with the band’s intellect. So does “Lyrical Lies.” So does “There’s A Class For This,” with a hint of even more boastful arrogance (“I may be ugly / but they sure love to stare”), the kind of lyrics that sound like things you tell yourself after rejection. “The Fourth Drink Instinct” is a messy narrative about a young girl being taken advantage of by a man while drunk, but quickly turns into a song blaming the girl for drinking in the first place. In the place of explicit bursts of violent fantasies, the album instead opts for a low and consistent hum of violences, the ones that seem more logical to someone who might also be sad, who might also want to turn their loneliness into a weapon without having it actually look like a weapon.
In Hamden, the crowd has filled out a bit more, but barely. The band is stalling, waiting for more bodies to get into the room. You can tell, because it is easy to see them shuffling backstage, a member poking a head out every now and then. This is, in part, no fault of their own—Hamden is not New York City or even Pittsburgh. I wouldn’t have crossed state lines for this show, and was amazed to see that it was happening at all. For a 15 minute drive and a 10 dollar ticket, I could be easily convinced to see if there was any residual magic that my desire for nostalgia could drag up.
When the band finally comes out and plays through “Newport Living” and “There’s A Class For This,” it becomes obvious that they aren’t invested. The crowd of maybe 25 tries; a guy next to me nodding along to “Risque” and trying to sing all of the words stops himself in the middle of the “Medically speaking you’re adorable / and from what I hear you’re quite affordable” that opens the chorus. He looks around my age, both of us at the start of our 30s. We were perhaps both heartbroken a decade ago, at the dawn of our 20s, and looking for somewhere to place our pain. I feel this, the way I’ve aged and the loves and losses I’ve suffered in that aging, hanging over the room. It makes the display of dragging this particular album back out of the closet at first fascinating and then comically uncomfortable. There are endless ways that we have found and will find to blame women for things, particularly when it prevents us from unraveling our own unhappiness. But with Cute Is What We Aim For, all of its members either in their 30s or late 20s, standing on a stage and weaponizing decade-old bitterness doesn’t exactly echo to the corner of nostalgia that I thought it would. Even in the album’s catchier moments, like a very sharp performance of “Curse of Curves” and a slightly warmer acoustic version of the album’s best song, “Teasing to Please,” watching the show feels like being a senior in college and going back to hang out in the high school parking lot. Halfway through the show, I ask myself what I expected. I think I was hoping for the band to come out and play revised versions of their old songs, less bitter, less explicit in their hatred of the women they’ve built out of thin air and been broken by.
Twisting anger over heartbreak into something, well, cute, is easier for some genres than others. In emo, particularly during its heyday of attractive frontmen who fancied themselves poets, the misogyny was seen more as process than problem. Who among us, regardless of gender, hasn’t scrawled something in the silence of a notebook about an ex-someone? It’s a part of the coping, at least to a point. The problem is one of audience, though. The problem is the one of the notebook becoming public, sung to thousands. The problem is one of men being, largely, the only ones doing the singing. And, ultimately, the problem becomes when those men don’t age beyond the adolescent heartbroken temper tantrums that we all have before we learn better and start to know better. It’s not a measure of being morally superior to this band on stage, or not failing in my own politics around sadness, gender, and anger. But it’s the difference between trying to chip away at the emotional debt one has accrued versus piling on top of it. At moments in the show, I felt like I was exiting my current body and watching myself from through my younger eyes, wondering if this is what it was always going to come to. Returning to the balm for an old wound, ashamed that I once decided to wear it.
Though I didn’t know at the time I arrived at the Cute Is What We Aim For show in Hamden, a few days earlier, lead singer Shaant Hacikyan made the news for weighing in on Brock Turner, the Stanford rapist who got a decidedly light sentence for his crime. “Rape culture isn’t a thing, for real,” Hacikyan wrote on Facebook. “Playing the victim seems to fit the narrative,” he said. “In my 29 years I’ve yet to encounter a human who is looking to rape someone […] Look into the actual statistics & get back to me.” It was a terrible and ill-informed take, one that came from someone who seemed to have very little understanding of the world. It was slow to pick up news, in part because it was a Facebook comment, and in part because the band’s fading relevance made it so that few people cared. When I found out about it, googling the band in the dark of my office after the show, it was both stunning and not. It was a stance that directly echoed the band’s entire history. By the time the story gained traction, Hacikyan already issued a toothless apology, thanking people for educating him on the topic of rape culture before taking the stage to sing a song about a young girl, drinking so much that the men around her just can’t help themselves.
Before the encore, most of the crowd leaves, but I stay, the guy who gave up on singing lyrics still sticking around next to me. As the break before the encore stretches out, we look at each other, and he says the first words that he’s said to me all night.
“Shit, man. I dunno. I got a wife and a daughter now. This ain’t like it was when we were young, is it?”
I smile, and shake my head. No. No, it isn’t.