La Dispute - No-One Was Driving The Car

Concept albums aren’t necessarily new in the world of emo music, but La Dispute’s newest offering, ‘No-One Was Driving The Car’, pushes the envelope about as far as any band has before.

Jordan Dreyer’s vocal performance slides from throat-splitting, guttural cries to a breaking poetic metronome, reinforcing the cinematic nature of the record. His voice mirrors moments of terrific drama, whilst equally using tracks such as ‘Self-Portrait Backwards’ to slow your heartbeat and unravel the plot.

Said plot that twists through the history of La Dispute’s Michigan hometown, Grand Rapids, exploring religion, nature, and mortality through a warped psychological thriller that gives you a visceral sense of place. By adding in cuts from interviews and sermons, a sense of community bleeds through the record, helping to tie up all the otherwise gloriously erratic elements.

La Dispute took every minute of the six years since their last album, 2019’s ‘Panorama’, and funnelled it into a record full of chaos, passion and desire. Opener ‘I Shaved My Head’ musically tinkers around the edges while Dreyer’s vocal explodes into an existential crisis, before ‘Man With Hands And Ankles Bound’ lets guitar riffs and huge classically-emo drums crash all around.

Even tales not personally relevant to the quintet burst into life with enough electricity that they could easily be biographical, with 8-minute epic ‘Environmental Catastrophe Film’ and ‘The Field’ swirling in and out of control. There’s no denying, though, that its tracks such as ‘Steve’ that steal the focus the most, with vocal and music alike tearing the album apart at the seams.

La Dispute have long been considered one of the best Midwest emo-slash-experimental-punk bands of all time. Well, with this album, we can remove the qualifiers and say simply that La Dispute are one of the best bands of all time.