As in every single corner of music, there are routines in melodic hardcore split off, and they range from needless melodies to banal lyrical themes and often tasteless vocal patterns. Let’s face it, there are hundreds of generic stuff out there. However, as bands like İzmir, Turkey’s SCENES WE HAVE MISSED bring their heartfelt hardcore to the table with their debut effort, it’s clear that there are still loads of great acts that are able to strongly connect with us on an emotional level with the angst and personal themes and issues that you can relate to. Today, we’re giving you the insightful journey into the details of the record through the full stream and the band’s track by track commentary!
The name ‘’Broken but Blessed’’ gained meaning for us when we came to realize that there is no meaning in filtering or hiding what we feel and in that moment the mask that has been worn daily started to come off. The absence left behind can be expressed as ‘’Being Broken’’ but we were not alone. We had each other and were able to come up with ideas about how to take the bitterness from our lives and put it into our music, instead of just keep ignoring it. This unity/community is what made us feel ‘’Blessed.’’ Every track evolved from our personal experiences; some of them are directly from our daily lives while others are just the declarations of the things that haven’t been spoken loudly among people recently.
“Broken but Blessed” by SCENES WE HAVE MISSED is available now via Bandcamp and Spotify.
Guilt Free
This track is dedicated to anyone who feels like they are stuck or prisoned in the routine of loss and disappointment. It suggests that you shouldn’t be low because of the problems that occur by themselves, problems that you can’t solve easily. It is about being completely honest with yourself and the acceptance of what you are capable of and what you are not.
5 A.M.
This song is about the realization of how small and disposable the human beings can be from time to time: Waking up from a dream to its echoing visions, you get stunned for a while and it that moment, I saw all the chaos, all the destruction and all of the lives that ended in vain. Voices whispered how good everything could be if it wasn’t us, who started all those wars and reasonless killing. With returning to sleep and waking up the other day I also realized that sleeping can cure of a lot of things but on the other hand, it may become the sickness itself: If you are in an unhealthy state of mind, you spend a lot of time sleeping and after some time, it becomes your routine; a cycle of blackout.
There’s a part which reflects this idea:
‘’We’d rather give to sleep our lives away than, hear the stories of how we’ll die alone.
We’re too afraid to dwell on it; so we’ll dream, yeah we’ll dream until we can’t tell sleep from death.’’
Scenes
It is about childhood and remembering this period of our lives with an unknown guilt and regret as well as with longing and bliss. It tells about how its glimpses sometimes come alive before our eyes and though we never stop growing, we don’t also want to really stop reminding ourselves that we loved it when we were kids. Eventually, identity crisis occurs as you are not the same person you were once, but you have to find a way to be peaceful in your life. You should stop being anxious all the time, overcome your anger and open your eyes for one more time, just to see if you can find the peace once you’ve had without even knowing it until you were a grown up. Lastly, it is a promise to make everything good for the family and friends.
The Bearers
This is about youth and how it gets wasted away. In this song, who we call ‘’the bearers’’ are our generation of people who were born into a society of shity personalities, which is ruled by constant hypocrisy and deception. You can clearly see the fear imposed on people who were born before you and all they managed to do was to pass that same fear to their children as a heritage. There is no one to look up to and still you hear them say that you are young and strong, that you can manage anything you want. Also, a bearer is a person who carries the coffin at a funeral. So that makes us the people who carry the coffins of our friends and the dreams and the promises of the future. It doesn’t mean necessarily being dead in literal meaning, but with the loss of everything that defines you, you are as good as dead. To reveal this feeling, there’s a line written about it: ‘’I feel like I’m ninety, when I’m only nineteen.’’
Some parts are based on the relationships of/with our friends. We used to spend a lot of time together and we partied a lot. We wouldn’t sleep until the sun was up and it was morning but now, the sun doesn’t seem to rise again and we’ll spend our time awake, in the dark, forever; but in complete solitude this time. This sadness caused by the disconnection, is represented like this:
‘’We won’t sleep until there’s colors in the sky. There were once colors in the sky.
How the sun leaves you alone? How the display reflects that certain feeling of our souls?’’
Fury
It is about being lost in everything that’s happening around you. When the only emotion you are able to show is anger, you question yourself after hurting yourself and other loved ones. It tries to provoke the better sides of the people to overcome their wrath and have more healthy relationships. After a heavy storm, the sight of a harbor is comforting, and as metaphors, ‘’feeling like Chuck Noland’’ and ‘’reaching to harbors’’ show the struggle to continue being the best you can after all the shit you’ve been through.
