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Truth: Dashboard Confessional used to be in a Christian band.
Truth: The last Bright Eyes album name-checked God and was fixated with spirituality.
Lesser-known truth: There's only other genre as preoccupied with both relationships and the Lord, and that genre is Christian metal.
It's hard to tell the difference between emo and Christian metal lyrics. Both are obsessed with bleeding, love, ambivalence, angels, apocalypse and salvation. In the spirit of Alkaline Trio's concert at the House of Blues on November 25, we present this quiz. Try to figure out which lyrics are emo and which are Christian metal.
1. "Your stand-by flight has just arrived / tongue-tied bleeding from your eyes / Even Christ himself would cringe/at the sight of your scars / While you're counting sheep / I'll count my lucky stars."
2. "The contingencies of a day unravel my senses / And now your distance is darkness / My hope has been beset by your absence / I decay from inside / Underneath it all, there is still life / Despite it all, there is still love."
3. "Oh, how we shouted, how we screamed / Take notice, take interest, take me with you / When all our fears fall on deaf ears tonight / they're burning the roads they built to lead us to the light."
4. "There's nothing for me here / It's all the same / And even though I know / that everything might go / go downhill from here / I'm not afraid."
5. "I lose every time I fight you know / I love to think I'm giving up / I love to think I'm letting go / I'm bleeding tonight."
6. "Oh, that birdlike appetite / Lo, passive fasts make us contrite? / On silken highways of the night/The spiders crawl my candlelight."
7. "I became a lonely prisoner / bound by chains of doubt / Nowhere could I find the meaning / of things happening to me."
8. "The lines of history became the scenery / It's strictly an accessory, an image to uphold. But it's all in fun and sin until someone calls it in / The cycle comes around again / But I'm older now and don't you know, I've figured out the antidote / It overwhelms, engulfed in smoke
9. Beauty blessed / All confess undenied / except inside / black seeds of jealousy / forced inside
10. It takes all my faith just to start / I don't care now how much I'm wrong / My song, it shames your ears / every sentence a failure
11. Did you expect it all to stop at the wave of your hand? / Like the sun is just going to drop if it's night you demand / Well, in the dark we are just air, so the house might dissolve / But once we are gone, who is gonna care if we were ever here at all?
12. Mayday, mayday / Too many voices, too much noise in my ear / Don't want to lose contact over this black ocean / Now you sing, follow love / I'll be safe in devotion
Emo Quiz Answers
1. Emo: from Alkaline Trio's Cringe
2. Christian metal: from As I Lay Dying's Distance is Darkness
3. Emo: from Dashboard Confessional's Several Ways to Die Trying
4. Emo: from Yellowcard's Way Away
5. Christian metal: from Showbread's Despair Has a Name
6. Emo: from Jets to Brazil's Psalm
7. Christian metal: from Crimson Moonlight's The Pilgrimage
8. Emo: from the New Amsterdams' Spoils of the Spoiled
9. Christian metal: from Living Sacrifice's Black Seeds
10. Emo: from Jimmy Eat World's The Most Beautiful Things
11. Emo: from Bright Eyes' An Attempt to Tip the Scales
12. Christian metal: from Blindside's Caught a Glimpse