Valentine's Day has come again, meaning you are either celebrating your love life or hating on those who are. The holiday's backlash is the perfect vehicle for emo, the genre that strives on tragedy and melodrama. Here are the six most overwrought emo songs about Valentine's Day. If you have additions to this list, please engrave them on a candy heart, take a picture of yourself holding said heart in the mirror (make sure camera/phone is visible), upload it to your Friendster profile and and link the image in our comments.
6. Thursday "Cross Out The Eyes" It's not the first screamo band, or the most popular screamo band, but Thursday might have been the first popular screamo band. If At The Drive-In counts, then Thursday is the first popular screamo band whose most successful record dropped on an independent label -- even though Thursday subsequently signed to Island. Yes, these distinctions are important. "Cross Out The Eyes" is the heaviest of the tracks on the band's landmark Full Collapse, thanks to guest shouts from Thomas Schlatter of cred band the Assistant. Like many songs on Full Collapse and the innumerable bands who started in the album's wake, "Cross Out The Eyes" is full of flowery language and violent imagery. The dire irony of "the mourning dove gets caught in the telephone wire" is enough fuel for a February 14 mope-fest, but singer Geoff Rickey really takes it there: "Drain the blood from this valentine." It's all a set up for a love note about blue skies and smoke and wings of doves -- the same birds that got caught in the phone lines? That would just be terrible.
5. Vendetta Red - "Three Chord Valentine" Vendetta Red was a Seattle power pop emo band along the lines of Hot Rod Circuit and Ultimate Fakebook with a few sassy, Blood Brothers-ish screams for good measure. It was a band perpetually on the cusp of breakthrough, but never crossed the threshold -- unless you count a support slot with Dashboard Confessional. "Three Chord Valentine" was a quasi hit for the band, in that it appeared on two different releases. It's standard major chord fare -- really, there are four chords in this song, but Vendetta Red wasn't very "mathy" -- and the sugar coating masks its graphic lyrics. Slit wrists, corpses covered in moss, vomiting, syringes to the neck. Remember the viral videos of TV news exposes on the dangers of emo? Vendetta Red took these dangers, shoved them in a heart-shaped box and tied a bow around them.
4. Juliana Theory - "This Valentine Ain't No Saint" There were reasons that emo kids wrote off the Juliana Theory. 1) The band released albums on Tooth & Nail records and was incorrectly assumed to be a Christian band. 2) It released an album with the trying-wayyyyyy-too-hard title Emotion Is Dead. "This Valentine Ain't No Saint" is one of those girl-hater songs whose lyrics could have been written by a random emo song javascript generator: "Now that you're dead to me, it's alright;" "I'll never throw my heart away;" "It's your fault;" "I'm not telling you I'm sorry;" and a chant of "Goodbye, goodbye, valentine." People didn't bash Tooth & Nail bands because of Jesus, they disregarded them because of the assumption that those bands couldn't cut it in the secular market and had to be marketed to a smaller niche. With the Juliana Theory, this was all too true.
