Stadium, Change of plans, we’re coming home

Ah. Thank God for that occasional compulsion I get to do at least a little bit of research, ’cause now all the pieces have fallen into place in my head. I knew the four guys in H-town’s Stadium — guitarist/vocalist Jeff Stilwell, bassist Stephen Henderson, guitarist/vocalist Ramzi Beshara, and drummer Clay Jasper — had been in bands before now, but I hadn’t realized ’til just now that they’d all (or almost all; not sure about Jasper) done time in indie-rock heroes Little Compass, who were one of those damn few local bands that’ve really made people outside our sweaty city sit up and take notice. Hell, they were even signed to Negative Progression, for crying out loud, before they imploded (for reasons I’m not privy to).

It doesn’t stop there — before Little Compass, Henderson and Beshara happened to play in one of the top-flight emo bands in town way back in the day, The Record Time, whose “A Girl a Rose a Stage” still lives on on my iPod. And Beshara and Stilwell also happened to play in The Maria Project, after which Stilwell went on to be in The Shallow Tide. Oh, and it turns out my ears weren’t deceiving me after all — towards the end of the cool, murky “Crown,” the Stadium boys do in fact namecheck hometown pop-folksters Papermoons…whose Daniel Hawkins used to play in Little Compass, too. Ah, what a tangled web we weave.

Of course, it’s nowhere near fair to judge Stadium on the strength of the band members’ past endeavors, but luckily, with Change of plans, we’re coming home, I don’t have to. While I did indeed like The Record Time and Little Compass, they never seemed to really hit their full potential — Stadium, on the other hand, grab the brass ring and don’t let go. The band carves out its own specific niche of post-emo rock, evoking Jimmy Eat World, The Get Up Kids, The New Amsterdams, and Taking Back Sunday but with tinges of somewhat more challenging stuff thrown in.

The whole damn thing’s good; let me just throw that out there. The melodies swoop and soar like the best parts of Mae’s Destination: Beautiful, the guitars blaze nicely, and the vocal harmonies don’t miss a thing. The more I listen to tracks like “Fairweather,” “124,” and “Ground Zero,” the more I wish I was in my car at night with the windows down (aren’t all emo-rock songs best listened to like that?). And I’ve got to give credit to the band for “Coming Clean,” to boot, which has got to be one of the few post-breakup songs I’ve ever heard that’s sad while not bitter or recriminating; it’s just the sound of regret and loss, pure and simple. (And yeah, it helps that the vocals remind me of my perennial ’80s-romantic-pop favorites The Outfield.)

Out of all seven tracks, “Nine Twelve Twenty-One” marks the album’s apex, simultaneously anthemic and jagged and leaping deftly between Jimmy Eat World prettiness to Burning Airlines-style post-hardcore. It comes off like No Knife or Edsel in the end, neither of which is a bad thing. And I can already tell the chorus is going to be stuck in my head for a week or three. Which is no bad thing, either.