Moose Blood formed in Canterbury, England, in 2012 after its members grew tired of the hardcore bands they had come up in and wanted more melody and more singing in their music. Two years, a demo, an EP and a split later, the band signed with No Sleep Records and was flown to California to record its debut full-length. I’ll Keep You in Mind, From Time to Time arrived in the middle of emo’s revival, and it sounds like a band that spent its teenage years with Jimmy Eat World and Brand New in heavy rotation. That devotion is the album’s greatest strength and its most persistent weakness. When Moose Blood write about their own lives, the songs are warm, specific and disarmingly honest. When they write about their record collections, the illusion starts to slip.
Saosin guitarist Beau Burchell handled production, and by this point he was a seasoned name in post-hardcore, with credits for The Bronx and Drop Dead, Gorgeous. His work here balances raw mid-2000s emo sentimentality with crisp, punchy alt-rock production. The album is built on the interplay between Eddy Brewerton’s rhythm guitar and Mark Osborne’s clean, melodic lead riffs. Rather than burying the band under a wall of sound, Burchell leans on guitar tones that move between clean and overdriven, leaving plenty of room for the vocal melodies to carry the songs. It is a restrained approach from a producer known for heavier work, and it suits a band whose best weapon is intimacy rather than volume.
Brewerton is that weapon. His delivery ranges from speech-like, almost spoken-word verses to full-throated emotional hooks, and his British accent gives even the most familiar emo phrasing a distinctive charm. The vocals sound captured rather than constructed, with the band favoring authenticity over pitch correction, and those small imperfections give the album much of its warmth. The performances feel closer to the band’s live show than to a polished studio product. Moose Blood also generate real emotional thrust without ever resorting to screaming. The yells are loud and heartfelt, but they never slide into the sing/scream/sing formula that dominated post-hardcore in the years before this record.
Lyrically, the album circles nostalgia, domesticity, unconventional family roles and vulnerability in romance, all filtered through a steady stream of pop culture and scene references. Moose Blood wear their influences on their sleeves in much the same way the Game did on The Documentary, sprinkling name-drops throughout the album. “Bukowski” alone nods to Morrissey, Death Cab for Cutie and Jimmy Eat World. “Swim Down” reaches for Nirvana, and “Boston” tips its cap to Brand New. As with the Game, the references are endearing at first, a signal that the band knows exactly where it comes from. Eventually they wear thin, and the album starts to sound less like a band taking its place in the scene than a band fanboying over it.
The frustration is that Moose Blood clearly do not need the crutch. Opener “Cherry” is the album’s most distinctive piece of writing, a hushed confession from Brewerton about his wife and stepdaughter and the complicated new family he has stepped into. He sings about being only 23 and suddenly engaged with a family of his own, and about the ache of loving a child who will never quite see him as her father (“But look at me now, I’m engaged to be married/I’m only 23 and I got myself a family/She’s not mine and she never will be/I’m reminded everyday/She’s not mine and it fucking kills me/She won’t look at me that way”). It is an unconventional subject for an emo song, and it lands precisely because it belongs to no one but Brewerton. Songs like this prove the band can write something unique when it is not in name-check mode, which makes the constant references elsewhere more frustrating.
“Anyway” carries a similar emotional weight, grappling with the helplessness of watching parents suffer through illness and failing health, with Brewerton’s mother at the center of the song. It is about deterioration, but also about the coping mechanisms that come with that reality. Osborne’s guitar work is the standout here, with bright, single-note arpeggios ringing out over the verses and giving the track a restless, melancholy shimmer beneath the vocals. The bass provides a warm, rounded presence in the midrange, grounding the song as it builds.
“Gum” pulls the focus inward to a quiet night with someone special. The song lives in small, low-key moments of affection, like watching movies, listening to music together and brushing the hair out of a partner’s eyes. It is a reminder that the little things often carry the most weight in a relationship. The arrangement stays restrained for most of its run, mirroring the intimate atmosphere of the lyrics, before the chorus and outro swell into something larger. The contrast gives the song’s tenderness room to breathe.
“Bukowski” has become the band’s signature song, and it explores emotional distance through a web of scene and literary references, with Ernest Hemingway name-checked alongside the Charles Bukowski of its title. Glenn Harvey’s drumming shines brightest here, with pop-punk percussion that moves at a brisk, energetic pace and contrasts with the quiet domestic imagery of the lyrics. The band leans on a repeating, cathartic chorus hook that swells in intensity each time it returns. It is the album’s clearest example of the references working in the band’s favor, woven into the song’s emotional logic rather than dropped in as decoration.
For all its charm, I’ll Keep You in Mind, From Time to Time is a formulaic record. Clean, jangly guitars in the verses, driving octaves and heavy snares in the choruses and a quiet vocal finish repeat so often that the deeper cuts start to bleed together, with songs like “Pups” and “Chin Up” struggling to stand apart from the singles. The album also sands down two of the band’s earliest songs. “Bukowski” and “Boston” both appeared on earlier releases, where the rougher production of a smaller budget gave them a scrappy urgency. Here, the bigger budget brings a cleaner sheen, and something is lost in the translation.
Ultimately, the album works because of Brewerton’s conversational delivery, which makes even the most familiar structures feel like a friend confiding something late at night. Its timing mattered, too. Released at the height of emo’s revival, the record’s unabashed embrace of genre history gave Moose Blood cross-generational appeal: Older fans heard the bands that raised them, and younger listeners found a gateway to a lineage they were only beginning to discover. I’ll Keep You in Mind, From Time to Time rarely strays from its formula and too often hides behind its heroes, but when Moose Blood trust their own stories, they sound like a band worth keeping in mind.
For Fans Of:
- Jimmy Eat World — Clarity
- Basement — Colourmeinkindness
- Real Friends — Maybe This Place Is the Same and We’re Just Changing