Featured Essay: Please Let Me Hold The Brave Little Abacus in My Arms

by Michael Sauter

The Brave Little Abacus’ second full length album, “Just Got Back From the Discomfort - we’re alright,” commonly known as “Just Got Back” or “JGB,” turned 15 years old in May. It’s also one of the most influential albums of the 21st century when informing the tastes of young emo musicians. You may have never heard of it, but if you’ve ever perused the relevant circles of music discussion on the internet, you may already know its cover art. Band leader Adam Demirjian’s father is captured in a grainy photo expressing some kind of volatile emotion between laughing and sobbing while on his honeymoon. It’s a photo that does a cosmically great job in conveying the album’s universality without having to say a word. 

For the first ten years of its existence, it was never released on physical media. For that same amount of time, it was never even available on streaming. The long-awaited release of the record was an embodiment of just how independent the group was: a limited run cassette that is now hopelessly out of print. This crucially important band for both myself and innumerable independent musicians insisted on distributing their music entirely through a Mediafire folder.

OK - that’s not entirely accurate. The band’s last release in their cosmically, unfairly brief run as a group was an EP entitled “Okumay,” which saw a limited vinyl release on Jeff Rosenstock’s Quote Unquote Records. I didn’t know who Jeff Rosenstock was, and I barely knew who The Brave Little Abacus were. I was sixteen. With the twenty or so bucks I earned from helping out with yardwork, I bought it immediately. I lost my sleeve. 

It came in a pizza box, if I recall correctly. Inside was a bright red patch, in sharpie was written “THE BRAVE LITTLE ABACUS.” It was one of my prized possessions that, unfortunately, was lost in the inevitable adolescent shifting of bedrooms over time. There’s many, many things I’d like to go back in time and smack myself for, but perhaps none greater than that.

My older brother is about six years older than me. During our court-ordered trips back and forth between parents’ houses, his Nissan Altima was one of the first places I felt emboldened and validated in my fixation on music. My budding record collection, my unending pile of MP3’s, my new Christmas gift of an Audio Technica LP60 - all of it was proven worthy when I could burn my brother a CD and listen to it in the cold, dark stretch of Pennsylvanian mountain highways.

The Brave Little Abacus weren’t like that at first. My brother and I could bond over any number of bands that the internet had branded as “emo” that I was absolutely smitten by. Yet, TBLA were one of a growing number of bands that signaled to me that our tastes were shifting ever so slightly askew. Some bands had absolutely wrecked me to the point of violent sobbing, some of them filled me with as much manic energy as a teenager could be filled with - but either way, the hit rate on impressing my older brother was faltering a bit. The Brave Little Abacus were one of those groups at first.

I burned a copy of JGB for him, and was disheartened to hear that he didn’t really enjoy it. He knew it was interesting, he knew it was unique, but he thought it was weird. Ah, no matter, so did I. 

I quickly launched into a full-throated defense of the album, attempting with every word to conjure up the same, vivid emotion that the album stirred in me at 1 AM in my childhood bedroom; just how validating the album was to every experienced awkwardness. It wasn’t “weird,” it was the most uniquely resonant thing ever - and after he listened to it for a while - he would get it.

Well, no dice. For a bit, at least.

In the interim, we may have experienced pivotal moments in our personal developments that we like to forget more or less shaped who we were. That ungodly awkward time in our lives where we were learning how to operate independently. My tastes kept changing, I kept experiencing a weird childhood that would entail a lot of online discussions and all-nighter video game sessions that bled into a group of friends that had no idea what to make of the corporeal, tangible world we were going to step into after highschool. My brother’s trips became limited to the few weekends per month he’d come home from college to do laundry and have coffee with our grandparents. We were still brothers, eager to spend hours on a Friday night playing video games and sharing what cool things we had found, but we were changing.

There were three times that my brother turned around on albums I had annoyed him with. Two of them were around the same time, a bit earlier than this.

He had been through a particularly nasty event in his personal life, and the ways he selflessly tried to shield his overeager little brother from them spilled over slightly. He didn’t want to hear about me trying to force-feed him The Hotelier’s “Home, Like No Place is There” or The Mountain Goats’ “Tallahassee,” and I pushed one too many buttons during a tender time when they were rejected.

He’d confide in me later what I already knew: that wasn’t really how he felt. I heard long stories after this of how much these two albums in particular stuck with him and affected him personally. We could share how much they made us both weep. We’d spend a much nicer day in a year or two house-sitting for our aunt on a beautiful summer evening eating pulled pork sandwiches and gushing over “Beat the Champ.”

The other wasn’t during that time, but hit similarly. One night after returning from college, I would prepare a bunch of cool things to show him as I normally did, but he jumped right to tell me about the experience he had this week riding the subway. On a whim, he decided to turn on “Okumay,” and bam. He got it.

That feeling is an indescribable one. It’s easy to minimize it or trope it away as an adult, but there I was: my older brother got it. I was the cool younger brother. I impressed him. The man I looked up to more and more increasingly as a beacon of integrity - a model man.

We’d spend the next ten or so years regularly talking about Just Got Back and how much we loved it. We’d watch their last show, “Live at the Vic Geary Center” on YouTube and marvel at the kids in the crowd filming the show on their 3DS’s (before that was a meme) and generally despair about the fact that this band was done. I’d lament that I’d never hold a copy of the record in my hands. Our weekend night nerd sessions never ended. Around my 21st birthday, the “Get Back” Beatles documentary premiered, and we stayed up until 3 AM watching it all and having some celebratory drinks. It’s a moment that puts a lovely bow on that time in our lives, in my opinion.

In an example of both how cool the universe can be sometimes, we ended up with our wives about five minutes from each other. I regularly go over to his house and play with my niece, and I share my experiences with her to her grandmother and her father regularly. I go home to my best friend. She recently bought me a pressing of Glass Beach’s “Plastic Death” on vinyl. She bought herself (but I steal it all the time) a pressing of Foxing’s exceedingly excellent newest, self-titled album.

Through those albums and many, many, many other recent emotionally-charged guitar music records, I hear The Brave Little Abacus’ fingerprints all over again. This can be deliberate, as I’m sure it is to a degree with Glass Beach or other, acclaimed contemporaries like the excellent Weatherday or Lobsterfight - but it also rings through every show me and my family go to, every emotional record we spin together, and the moments I spend digging through my childhood record collection. I stumble across “Okumay” and I’m reminded of how I made sense of the world.

Happy 15th, JGB. Let me buy you. Let me spin you. Let me hold you in my arms!

Michael Sauter (me) works at a university for his day job and has written about music as a hobby for about seven years. You can find me on Bluesky at @mikeisamattress.bsky.social‬, see some stream of consciousness reviews at https://www.albumoftheyear.org/user/sometimesmike/, and follow some links on my Bluesky if you’d wanna watch some YouTube videos I make.