Photo by Adam Lake.
A chorus of voices echoes out in unison as local emo-rockers Monument play the first chords of their last song on Saturday. Over the slow-building, melodic intro of the song “Breakfast,” a crowd of more than a hundred at The Lab—an all ages DIY venue in Alexandria, Va.— sings along, drowning out the band’s own vocals: “I don’t eat breakfast every day / but I should,” they sing in slow, gleefully emphatic unison. It’s not just the last song of the show, but the last song Monument will likely ever play together as a band.
Over the past eight years, Monument—comprised of guitarist/vocalist Gabe Marquez, 27, bassist/vocalist Dan Doggett, 29, guitarist Anton Kropp, 30, and drummer Brandon Korch, 29—has established themselves as one of the area’s most adored bands because of their unabashed love and influence of ’90s midwestern emo, which is wholly apparent in the group’s melodic, noodly, but deeply infectious blend of emo and pop-punk. They were an emo revival band before there was an emo revival, but more importantly, they were our emo band.
But now Monument is finished. The band announced last month that they’re calling it quits after Kropp was offered a full-time job at across the country in Seattle. So the band decided that, if they were going to end it, they were going to end it on their terms: With one last show.
The idea to form an emo band at a time when the genre was still reeling from a vicious backlash, due in part the Hot Topic-ization of the genre, was born out of a mutual adoration for bands like Braid and The Promise Ring. Monument came together at the University of Maryland in early 2006. At the time, Kropp and Korch were playing in a hardcore band. “We were in a hardcore band at the time, Dawntreader, but we always wanted to do that midwestern emo thing,” Korch says. At the same time, Doggett and Gabe had been talking about starting an emo band as well. “When I saw Algernon Cadwallader (ed. note: An emo band out of Philly that broke up last year) I was like ‘Of course! Why am I not doing this?” Dogget recalls. Soon after, the four—who were already friends through the University of Maryland’s underground music scene—resolved to start a band together. “That first practice we wrote two songs,” Marquez recalls.
Photo by Matt Cohen.
But as most college bands breakup after graduation, all of Monument’s members found jobs in the area and continued to write songs and play shows. After a couple years of playing shows at various DIY venues in the area, the band released a three-song 7-inch that made some splashes in indie-rock message boards and blogs. The EP caught the attention of Will Miller, who, at the time, ran the influential punk blog Sound as Language. Soon after, Miller, along with Chuck Daley, started the indie label Tiny Engines, who put out Monument’s first full-length album, Goes Canoeing, on vinyl. “We were shocked. Nobody really ever came to our shows, other than a group of 10 or 15 people who were our friends,” Korch says. “I never felt like anyone knew who we were, so when someone said they wanted to put down money to press our vinyl, that was awesome.”
As a band, Monument has been far more successful than they ever thought. They’ve played shows consistently throughout the region since forming, put out another EP, Sweatpants Fever, and, most recently, appeared on a split 7-inch with bands Dikembe, Hightide Hotel, and Jet Set Sail. But being in a band always took a backseat to the other things going on in the lives of the Monument’s members. Everyone in the band holds down full-time jobs, and both Doggett and Kropp recently got married. While many of the bands Monument played shows with early on—like Connecticut’s The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die and the now-defunct Algernon Cadwallader out of Philly—began to get national attention from non-stop touring and such, they were content with playing mostly local and regional shows, save for a short tour they did in 2009, which took them as far as Chicago. “If we wanted to make a career out of this, we would have been on the same wavelength,” Korch says. “You have to work hard. Nobody blows up without doing anything. You have to tour so much. You have to dedicate your life to it. And none of us were ever at that point where it was convenient.”
Despite little touring, Monument still made a pretty big name for themselves, and that certainly showed at Saturday’s show at The Lab. People from as far as Ohio and Boston came just to see their last performance. The show, which they played with D.C.’s The Fordists, Philly’s Mike Bell & The Movies, Foxing out of St. Louis, and Shat Shorts—a side project for Marquez, Korch, and Kropp (also breaking up due to Kropp’s move)— was a bittersweet moment for the band: they just finished recording a new full-length album at Baltimore’s Developing Nations studio.
Photo by Matt Cohen.
While the timing of the album isn’t great, Kropp says they’re still going to put it out, hopefully sometime in the summer. It’s the last mark they’ll make as a band and they want to make sure it’s a lasting legacy. “It’s terrifying to move across the country,” Kropp says. “Music is a huge part of my life and now it’s a huge question mark.” Although they’re not sure if Tiny Engines or another label is going to put it out or not, the band has no problem putting up the money to self-release it. “One or two thousand dollars in the long run is not a big deal considering it’s something we spent eight or nine years working towards,” Kropp says.
As with any emo band, Monument writes songs that often channel the anxieties and hardships derived from real-life experiences. Working through the ups and downs of life through music is a cathartic experience, and one that Monument does well. That’s apparent right down to the band’s name, which Korch came up with. “We started this band right at the end of college and I didn’t know how long it was going to be around,” Korch says, “so I wanted a name that would be a marker of where I was in my life, and that’s why I came up with Monument.” That name has proved to be marker for a lot in the lives of each band member.
“So much has changed in all of our lives since we started, but this band has always been a constant,” Marquez says. “From ending school, to Dan and Anton getting married. It’s going to be weird to not have that constant.”
