East Ash – Crushing A Flood – Compact Disc

Description

East Ash – Crushing A Flood – Compact Disc

Crushing A Flood is a rare, cult-favorite release from the Midwest post-hardcore/emo underground, emerging in the late 1990s. While East Ash never reached the mainstream heights of Jawbreaker, Mineral, or Sunny Day Real Estate, they were part of a crucial DIY scene that helped shape the emotional intensity, raw honesty, and melodic complexity that defined second-wave emo and post-hardcore in the American Midwest.

East Ash were a regional band, associated with the Midwestern emo movement, but they blended that sound with heavier post-hardcore elements, leaning into dynamic shifts, passionate vocals, and intricate guitar work.

Released in a limited run, Crushing A Flood captures a band at the height of their emotional intensity, playing music that feels equally inspired by the melodic vulnerability of emo and the angry catharsis of hardcore. This blend of fragility and fury was typical of heartland emo bands, many of whom came up playing in basements, VFW halls, and community centers, crafting their own unique voice far away from the polished coasts.

Crushing A Flood would fit comfortably alongside releases from labels like Deep Elm, Polyvinyl, or Caulfield Records — think angular guitar riffs, urgent, emotionally cracked vocals, and lyrics dealing with isolation, relationships crumbling, and the struggle to make sense of a world that feels too big and too indifferent.

There’s a weathered, stormy quality to the music, as if the songs themselves are coming apart at the seams, which fits perfectly with the album’s title, Crushing A Flood. The metaphor suggests both being overwhelmed by forces beyond your control and desperately trying to push back — a perfect encapsulation of the emo/post-hardcore mindset of the era.

East Ash’s fierce regional loyalty and DIY ethic made them local legends, even if they never achieved wider fame. Crushing A Flood exists in the mythology of Midwest emo — passed around by scene veterans. While bigger emo bands got signed, East Ash stayed a cult artifact, which only deepened their mystique. For people who came up in those scenes, finding a copy of Crushing A Flood became a badge of honor, like discovering a long-lost letter from an old friend you never quite forgot.

For those who know, East Ash represents the purity of Midwest emo and post-hardcore’s underground spirit — passionate, imperfect, unpolished, and real. They’re part of a hidden history, where bands played for gas money and couch space, and records were burned by hand, but the emotional weight of the music felt monumental.

If you love bands like Rites of Spring, Braid, Boys Life, Cursive, or Christie Front Drive, then tracking down Crushing A Flood is absolutely worth the search. Even if the band’s full story has faded into the mist, the raw honesty and sense of emotional geography in their music makes them forever part of the fabric of the scene.

Brand new, never played but not sealed in the factory plastic seal

C’est La Mort Records

Track Listing
1. Dreams
2. Australian Beaches
3. Doesn’t Know
4. Faceless
5. Wonderful Life
6. Flood
7. Funerals
8. Milk and Honey
9. Disease