Video Premiere: Mush-“I Was Confused”
Posted: by The Editor
Sometimes, it is hard to know where the band begins and where the bit ends with Mush. For those who were enmeshed during the peak of Chicago’s emo revival (2008-2016), a lot of the faces look familiar. Drummer Andy Hendricks is in Annabel. Jinno Redovan plays guitar and sings in Lettering. It almost fits into a pocket of projects you could unkindly call “members of” bands or supergroups; I will not do that to make that phrase pointless. Mush was originally borne out of a love of Vagrant Records and some other bands from the early 2000s emo wave. It was a bit different from what singer Erik Czaja had done before with Dowsing, as he was just singing and not playing guitar. A card game was also sold alongside the EP on the bandcamp page, called protect your brand. It laid out what I would almost call a Mush trope: outwardly silly branding with sometimes songs to match that. Future releases would even be a bit more playful, with the 2022 EP Dongle. But as the band is quick to point out, it never infected the songwriting, fitting into a familiar emo stance in taking your craft seriously but not overly so.
The newest record from Mush and the video we are premiering on the site fit in a comfortable middle ground and represent what it is like to have a conversation with the band. Andy is playing Pokemon Go while Erik relays a story to me. It makes for a fun enough dynamic that translates on record. There are mentions of Chicago landmarks, like the now-closed Tasty Freeze and the Chicago venue Subterranean, where I have seen Mush play. The video for “I Was Confused” is fun in a different way, taking footage from the World Fair when it was in New York in 1964. Watch the video yourself and become one with Mush.
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Hugo Reyes | @hvreyes5
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