Finally got to see Gehenna.

Last week I attended what has become an annual event in the Baltimore hardcore scene: Dom of Pulling Teeth's birthday show. The highlight for me this year was an actual performance by the elusive and infamous West Coast hardcore band Gehenna. Two years ago, they were also scheduled to perform, so I drove up for that show too. Gehenna cancelled, as was their wont at the time, but Starkweather did play, and absolutely blew me away, so I was glad I attended. This year, I figured Gehenna would cancel again, but I was happy enough about seeing Integrity and Ringworm, so I didn't feel too bad about the fact that once again, I'd go to a show that one of my all-time favorite bands was scheduled to play, and not actually get to see them.

But then, surprise surprise, Gehenna did show up. Dom posted on the internet two days before the show that he had picked them up from the airport, that they would definitely play. I was excited, but also nervous. Gehenna have a reputation for onstage antics that goes beyond just "being brutal" or whatever. As my friend Brandon has pointed out, they're almost an urban legend of a band. Everyone in the hardcore scene who has heard of them at all has heard the stories about singer Mike Cheese attacking audience members and laying waste to venues, even supposedly stabbing someone midset, a story of which I've heard so many different versions that at this point I don't believe any of them. Mike Cheese has fueled the fire where this sort of talk is concerned for many years himself, giving interviews in which he said intense, provocative things about both his philosophy and his behavior, things like this:
Q: When you hear about people in bands like Nirvana, Pennywise, etc. dying from overdoses, what’s your reaction?
A: I hope our band ends up like that. I couldn’t give a flyin’ fuck. Suicide is the only answer anyways. Just do it. Kill everybody.



The above is the only available Gehenna live footage from their prime days as a popular hardcore band. Nothing truly terrifying happens here, but as you can see, they were an exciting and violent live act. It may just have been performances like these combined with inflated rumors that created their mystique, or it may be that some of the stories really are true--I can't comment with any authority at all. But I can tell you that the potential for live terror and violence seems to be the main reason a lot of people want to see a Gehenna show these days. There was a show in California a few years ago that attained a level of infamy, where Gehenna showed up to the venue with only two members after the rest of the band had quit on them the night before. The two members set up a bass amp onstage for their set, played a hip hop song through it, and sat eating a burrito and smoking a blunt while the song played. That was their set. [Description paraphrased from this message board thread, which also includes Nate Newton of Converge telling a few entertaining Mike Cheese stories. Worth a read.]

While we were driving up to Baltimore, my friend Brandon mentioned the burrito set, and I started talking about how disappointed I'd be if that sort of thing happened when they played Baltimore. I've loved their music for over a decade, and I really wanted to see them play some of my favorite songs. A few years ago, I tried to capture some of my feelings about Gehenna, their music and their mystique in a piece of writing that I scribbled into a notebook and forgot about for a while. When I found the notebook in fall of 2008, I transcribed the piece exactly as I'd written it and posted it to tumblr. It was one of the first things I ever posted on that site, long before I started using it regularly. Here's some of what I wrote at the time:

Gehenna embodied the dark, anti-social worldview that was the eternal starting point for CrimethInc’s quest for romance. Even when they had just started and were still more like a straight edge moshcore band than anything else, their songs didn’t focus on anything so mundane as straight edge or beefs between ex-friends, like most bands of that stripe. Instead, they took the deep-ecology principles of hardline as a jumping-off point for condemnation of the entire human race, condemning all civilizational development as shit and hurling contempt at all responsible (including, presumably, themselves). By their third EP, their music had sped up to a frenetic tempo that made youth-crew seem slow but was still just this side of the inhuman speeds of power violence—-which allowed them to retain an essential human quality to their sound, even as Mike Cheese’s lyrics were moving further all the time into paranoid, Lovecraftian flights of fancy. Cheese’s guttural vocals were closer to the sounds one would expect to emanate from the throat of a monster than from anything human, and this fit well with his outsider’s perspective which seemed to regard itself as separate, in some respects below, and yet eternally more intelligent than the human masses that surrounded it. In songs like “Birth of Vengeance”, “Covet Thy Crown” and “Crush Opposition”, this outsider gave every indication of being prepared for and on the verge of launching an assault on civilization as a whole—-an assualt civilization seemingly hadn’t a prayer of withstanding.

This defiant stance of disdainful outsider fit perfectly with CrimethInc’s constant romanticization of struggle for food, shelter and, seemingly most importantly, freedom from mainstream society’s arbitrary restrictions. Truthfully, I couldn’t relate to Inside Front’s endless references to poverty and homelessness any more than I could relate to Gehenna’s hazy images of mythological zombie armies. And to be really truthful, it’s always seemed to me that a fair amount of gilding the lily must have gone into those stories in Inside Front—-after all, the thick newsprint magazine in which I read them came out on a regular basis for years. But there were emotions underlying all of this fiction, emotions that I understood and related to, that seemed true even if their circumstances did not: alienation and depression.

Before Gehenna played, I prepared myself. I took off my jacket and tied it around my waist. I took the lens cap off my camera and put it in my pocket. I didn't want to give myself anything that I could potentially lose once the band started playing. Of course, there was always the risk that my camera would get broken, but I was willing to take that chance in order to get pictures. There were hanging PA speakers on either side of the stage, about six feet off the floor, and I chose to stand underneath the ones on the left side of the stage. I didn't want to be out in the middle of the floor, because I figured that the violent dancing that was bound to occur would be happening out there. I didn't want any part of that. I also didn't want Mike Cheese to attack me. I figured I was minimizing my chances of that happening by standing off to the side. Yeah, I know, I'm a wimp. Fuck it, I've never pretended otherwise.

Most of the pictures I got didn't turn out too great. My camera is new to me--my dad gave it to me a few months ago--and I'd never used it to take pictures at a show before that night. Obviously I still have a lot to learn about its proper use. The picture above, the one that actually looks good, was taken from this brooklynvegan.com post. The rest of the pics on this page are my own efforts, for better or for worse.

When Gehenna hit the stage, Mike Cheese immediately started yelling about how he wasn't going to play until someone brought him some dope. He kept yelling about this between songs (and sometimes during songs) throughout the set. The band did go ahead and play, so it's tough to know how serious he was about this demand. I'll get more into that aspect later. Anyway, they opened with "83%," the first song on their first record, which is very heavy and moshy. Considering how far their sound has gotten from that style in the past decade or so, I was surprised to see them play this song, but it's one of my favorites by them, so it was a pleasant surprise. Mike Cheese jumped off stage and ran around in the front to get the crowd moving, but aside from a bunch of the sort of dudes who live to mosh at shows and don't care if they get hurt, most people just got out of the way. I think everyone was a little afraid of Mike Cheese. Within 30 seconds of the set's beginning, he'd shoved a well-known Baltimore area show videographer off the stage, and halfway through the first song, he did a really brutal stagedive onto about a dozen people standing immediately to my right. In fact, I saw him coming and took a step to the left, which is probably the only thing that kept me from being taken out as well.



Cheese was not the blur of constant motion that some stories about him had led me to expect, but that may speak more to his having gotten older and become a less frequent stage performer as it does to potential hyperbole in those stories. He'd have sudden outbursts, but most of the time, he stood still onstage and sang. That doesn't mean he was any less intense as a performer, though. The look in his eyes was terrifying. Despite the fact that he might have been standing still at any given moment, he always looked like he might be one second away from attacking you. As I write this it seems kind of ridiculous to say, but at the time, I was afraid to meet his eye. Whenever he'd look in my direction from the stage, I'd slide underneath the PA speakers so as to keep myself out of his line of sight. It felt like looking him in the eye might be interpreted as a challenge, and I didn't want to see how I'd fare in the event of such a thing.



A few songs into the set, during one of his rants about the fact that no one had brought him any dope, he charged off the stage into a backstage area that was on the other side of a curtain from where I was standing. I could hear commotion going on back there, but by the time I peeked around the curtain to see what was going on, it was impossible to see anything besides a scatter of equipment cases and a bunch of security people. Cheese ended up back onstage after a couple of minutes and the show continued--which makes it sound as if the band had stopped while he was offstage, which they didn't. They played an excellent set that lasted about 20 to 25 minutes and included quite a few songs that I knew--"Swarm/Deadshell," "Win By Attrition," "To Lay To Waste"--as well as some new material that I remember being faster than anything I'd heard them play before. Some mention has been made on Mike Cheese's blog recently of an upcoming 10 inch entitled "This World Is A Shithole," so perhaps these songs are material that will eventually materialize on that record. Or maybe it won't show up until years from now and will contain completely different songs; it's tough to tell with these guys.

Where the band was concerned, I'm pretty sure that the guitarist was the same guy who played guitar for them in the video I posted above of them playing "Swarm/Deadshell" back in the day. I can't be sure, though. I was expecting Mike Rhodes, longtime bassist, to still be in the band, but the bass player and drummer were both young longhaired guys who didn't seem like they'd been in the band very long, so hey, maybe not. I was particularly impressed with the drummer, who had a fast and ferocious style that stood out as being far better than the drumming on the most recent Gehenna records, Upon The Gravehill and the Lands Of Sodom EP. I hope they are able to keep this drummer around for a while, as he is definitely an upgrade.



The set ended with "First Blood," the opening track from their second LP, and my personal favorite of their releases, Negotium Perambulans In Tenebris. I had been headbanging and dancing around a little bit at some points during the set, but I freaked out a little bit during this song and sang along to most of the words at the top of my lungs. I was surprised I even remembered as many of them as I did. It's obviously been a long time since I was singing regularly in a hardcore band, because my throat was blown out completely after singing along to one two-minute song, and it's been sore off and on ever since. In fact, I may have given myself a cold. Pathetic, I know.

After the set, Brandon and I talked about our different perspectives on it. He'd stood in the back and watched from a safe distance. He made a comment that I thought had some truth to it, that Mike Cheese has built up such a reputation as an insane live performer that some of the stuff he does now is intended more to scare and impress people than to actually hurt them. From where Brandon was standing, he'd had a good vantage point to watch Cheese throw a chair and a mic stand into the crowd at different points (neither of which I'd been able to see from where I was standing). He said he was pretty sure Cheese wasn't actually aiming for anyone. Of course, we also talked about the fact that, for a bunch of guys from California, it'd probably be massively inconvenient to get arrested in Baltimore, and therefore maybe he'd toned things down a little bit. I couldn't help but bring up how intense and scary the guy had seemed onstage, though, and the intimidating look in his eye. In the end, it's at least my opinion that it's a little of both--Cheese is probably kidding or playing things up at times, as with the constant between-song screams of "Where's the fucking dope?" which seemed at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek. For the most part, though, I really do think the dude is crazy and just doesn't give a fuck what happens. I love the music that he and his band produce, and it's a direct result of that mentality. To some extent, I even enjoyed being frightened and intimidated by his live performance. I don't think I could ever live the way he does, though.


["83%," 1/10/10, filmed by an audience member]

One thing I forgot to mention: I did actually meet Mike Cheese earlier that night. He was selling Gehenna's merchandise himself, and he had a big display of their "Die High" series of t-shirts (click the image for a much bigger version of the pic):



I bought the Ol' Dirty Bastard shirt, which features a GG Allin quote on the back: "Live fast. Die." I'm not a fan of GG's music, but I did think that was the best of the three quote possibilities, and ODB is definitely my favorite of the three guys pictured on the front (though I also like Belushi a lot). Mike Cheese was very calm and friendly when I talked to him, and struck me as a nice guy. I figure he's less like GG Allin than people sometimes imply, and more like that dude you know from around who is really cool and into a lot of the same awesome things you like, but parties way harder than you and will get you in trouble if you try to keep up with him. After I bought the shirt from him, he told me to "stay high," and I figured it'd be better to just not bring up the fact that I'm straight edge. He reminds me a lot of a guy I used to know, who moved out to the West Coast several years ago. He sang in a band called PCP Roadblock (you can get an idea of what they were about by watching this video). He was a really nice guy, and we got along really well, but when he was partying, I stayed the hell out of the way.

For more information about Gehenna, read these interviews, which are reprinted on their Myspace:

Vomitose interview
Noise Mag interview (in English and French)

Some Gehenna interviews out there are pretty worthless but these are both interesting and informative.

And of course, you can check out studio versions of their music at their Myspace page.

2009: The Year In Review (Part One).

OK, I'll admit it: I've been neglecting this blog for quite a while. There are a number of reasons for that, one being the amount of writing I'm doing on Tumblr, where I have both a personal page and themed blog called Nuggets Of The Future (which had its genesis in a post a few months ago on this blog. You'll have to follow me there if you want to see frequently-updated posts, but no worries--I'm still going to post here.

This post, in particular, will kick off a series that will probably last all month, in which I write (relatively) short reviews of every new album I heard in the year 2009. I like the idea of doing this a lot better than the making of "top however-many albums" lists at the end of every year. Those lists get tough to make, because other than the first 5 or so, it can be tough to say which albums you really think do or don't deserve to be on them. I always have a lot more records I like in any given year than I have slots on a list to fill, and in hindsight, the choices of which albums to include at #13 or #17 always seems so arbitrary. In order to replace that arbitrary feeling with something much easier to understand and learn from, I present the following reviews (as well as the ones that will fill the 4 or 5 related posts to follow):

The Entrance Band - The Entrance Band

2006's Prayer Of Death, released under Guy Blakeslee's former solo-project moniker Entrance, was the Entrance Band's actual debut LP, and it was a glorious clusterfuck of chaotic boogie riffs and atonal violin sawing, the sort of thing that would appeal to fans of the first Velvet Underground LP (and without forcing them to sit through any Nico vocals). That album was obviously transitional in nature, though, so the fact that The Entrance Band is a much more organized, better produced, conventional blues-rock album isn't all that surprising. It is somewhat disappointing, though, and that disappointment is crystallized by a new, cleaned-up version of Prayer Of Death's opening track, "Grim Reaper Blues." Where the old version sounded like something broadcast from another planet, this new version sounds almost conventional, as if with only minor tweaks (none of which would need to affect the production), it could show up on classic rock radio tomorrow. And the thing is--it's still the most interesting song on the record. The problems with the production on that song are at least somewhat offset by the song's fascinating construction and awesomely bizarre riffing. Without that riffing, though, the remaining elements that made Prayer For Death so interesting to me are completely absent. I was excited when I found out there was a new Entrance Band album, because I was hoping to have another record's worth of Prayer For Death's awesomeness. As it is, though, this new record just doesn't hold up in comparison.

The Network - Bishop Kent Manning

Absolutely tortured freakout of a metalcore record here. Their first LP, This Is Your Pig's Portrait, was a bit disorganized. As I recently learned, this is probably due to their not having had a full-time vocalist on that record, and using a bunch of different friends and band members who normally played other instruments, so that no two tracks featured the same singer. They've got a steady lineup now, and instead of sticking with the chaos of their first album, this one goes in a more measured direction. What that translates into is lots of tortured screaming and slow-burn riffs, alternated with frantic headbanging riffs that manage to sound like insanity despite being, for the most part, perfectly comprehensible midtempo stuff. For those who felt that A Life Once Lost were never the same after The Fourth Plague: Flies, this record will hit the spot in a big way.

Slayer - World Painted Blood

Slayer hold a permanent position in my top 10 or 20 bands of all time, but in stating that, I must also admit that the apex of their career is long past. Their first five albums, and especially the three-album stretch between Reign In Blood and Seasons In The Abyss, set their legacy in stone, and any of the albums they've done since then have seemed almost anti-climactic. Even the best of them, 2001's God Hates Us All, wasn't quite on the level of those three classics. It was, however, a worthy sequel to Reign In Blood's all-killer-no-filler aesthetic, even with 90s era replacement drummer Paul Bostaph in the fold. Now, original skin-pounder Dave Lombardo has returned, which raises expectations through the roof. And yet, it is just at this point that Slayer trips up. World Painted Blood isn't terrible by any means, and I can even enjoy it when it's on, but the riffs here are subpar on the whole. It sounds like they're overthinking it, like what came naturally to them in 1986 now requires concentration to recreate. But as Neil Young will tell you, "The more you think, the more you stink." That adage is proven on this record, as riffs designed to be direct sound dumbed down, a production intended to sound raw and immediate makes the record sound like an unfinished demo, and a string of uptempo tracks designed to come across as focused just get boring. It's as if Slayer knew they were getting old, and felt that they'd have to work extra hard to prove to everyone that it wasn't affecting them. But in working extra hard, they only made it obvious that they aren't what they once were. I don't think Slayer is capable of making a BAD album, but this is the closest they've come to mediocrity, and that's a sad thing to see.

Dananananaykroyd - Hey Everyone

I never would have expected to hear a band that combines insanely upbeat poppy emo of the post-Cap'n Jazz stripe with the spastic art-core of the Blood Brothers, and yet, here are Dananananaykroyd, coming out of Glasgow and blowing my mind with a potent genre cocktail that I can't stop listening (and dancing) to. There are six members of this band, with the standard two guitars/bass/drums rock band lineup augmented by both a full-time singer and a guy who switches between singing and playing drums. The dual-vocal songs, especially "Watch This!", which is both an introduction and a sort of manifesto for the album and band as a whole, feature interplay that avoids conventional structure in favor of excited simultaneous rants. Both singers babble and scream, tripping over each other's words and lines in a manner that heightens the excitement of the song. But at other times, when the band is in their dual-drum lineup, the increased focus that it provides allows them to tap into even more potent melodies. The unstoppable bounce of "Totally Bone" only increases in intensity due to the driving percussive clatter on which the whole song is based. Meanwhile, "Black Wax" is constructed around a delicate melody without much heaviness at all. Yet both singers sing on it, and there are definitely moments when both of them are amped and in full freakout mode. It seems like Dananananaykroyd are willing to try anything that even sort of fits in with their mission, and as a result they sometimes veer so wildly within a song that they can make it seem like two different ones. It all works, though, and that's the important thing. This record is a nonstop blast, and whenever it ends, I just want to start it over again. What higher praise can I offer than that?

Passion Pit - Manners

There's a point that comes in the evolution of any particular subgenre of the indie scene, where the bands being produced by that subgenre become nigh-indistinguishable from their mainstream counterparts. With indie-techno-pop, that point has been reached, and Passion Pit's Manners is, even more than anything previously produced by LCD Soundsystem, completely indistinguishable from the sort of stuff they play in discos and on top 40 stations. Which all sounds like a condemnation, if you proceed from the first principle that indie is always better. But who says it is? The indie mentality, as an opposition to major labels and their privileging of monetary earnings uber alles, is dead and buried. With no political ideals left to fight for, that makes indie nothing but a genre. And when an indie band produces an example of a mainstream genre that can compete not only within the indie subset of that genre but right up there with the mainstream versions, shouldn't we be celebrating that? Passion Pit's "The Reeling" is the best dance single I've heard since Lady Gaga's "Poker Face," and the rest of this album, once I finally gave it a chance, proved to be full of additional examples of pure techno-pop nirvana. From the little-kid group chants on "Little Secrets" to the falsetto "na-na's" on "To Kingdom Come" and the ringing guitars on "Make Light"--which point back to the group's indie heritage no matter how deeply buried in the mix they are--this record is crammed full of pop music delights, and everyone short of the most diehard rockists should be able to appreciate them.

Four Tomorrow - Four Tomorrow

Four Tomorrow are from Japan, and have absolutely no profile in my native United States. However, because I know gamer dudes and other people who follow Japanese pop music, I occasionally hear Japanese bands I'd never come across otherwise. Four Tomorrow was the one band that that process led me to this year, and like Sambomaster, whom I discovered a few years before in the same manner, I find in their music a kind of joyous exuberance that you very rarely come across in American bands. Algernon Cadwallader have a bit of it, Cap'n Jazz had it when they were around, but I'm hard pressed to come up with examples other than those. That exuberance comes out in Four Tomorrow's choruses, which generally involve multiple members of the band shouting frantically, and in their frantic performance of uptempo punk riffs that might sound considerably more sedate in the hands of some other band. The guitars are jangly rather than distorted, but the punk influence is nonetheless at the forefront; it's because sometimes, playing something sloppily but with heart is more perfect than nailing it with technical perfection. Four Tomorrow's songs are ramshackle in construction, and played so quickly that you get the impression of all the members jumping around and falling all over themselves in the studio, just like they do in live situations. But their intrinsic jubilance, their incredible excitement at the very fact that they're a band that's playing songs, is impossible to escape. For that reason, Four Tomorrow's debut album is an infectious thrill.

Manic Street Preachers - Journal For Plague Lovers

At this point, it's hard to even talk about the Manic Street Preachers in terms of their sound. They're the sort of band that I use to explain other bands. I found out how inconvenient that could be earlier this year, though, when trying to explain The Cribs to a friend of mine by saying that they sounded somewhat like the Manics. He'd never heard the Manics, so the reference meant nothing to him. Fortunately, we could hit up Youtube and watch some Generation Terrorists/Holy Bible era MSP videos, and he immediately learned what I was talking about. When writing a review that attempts to encapsulate a band's sound WITHOUT sending the reader to Youtube, things get a bit harder. Part of what's weird about it is that all of the reference points I want to cite post-date MSP: mid-90s Britpop, post-Y2K Britpunk revival (think Libertines/Dirty Pretty Things), and oh, here's one that goes back farther--British glam-rock from the 70s, like T. Rex or Gary Glitter. Roll all these things up into a ball, and you've got the Manics, though that's only half the story, at least for their best material. Because their best material featured lyrics by rhythm guitarist Richey Edwards, who used his unique worldview and remarkable wit to give the Manics a verbal personality that was unmatched on the British alt-rock scene in the early 90s. Tragically, Richey disappeared in February 1995, never to be seen again. Fans, family members, and even the rest of the band have long held out hope that he'd reappear, but it hasn't happened yet, and hope's a hard thing to keep up after 14 years. Journal For Plague Lovers, then, is an attempt at closure, a trip through the notebooks Edwards left behind when he disappeared, in order to yield one last album featuring his lyrics. There are some gems here, too: "Only a god reserves the right to forgive those who revile him," from the title track; "crucifixion is the easy life," from "Doors Closing Slowly;" and "Jackie Collins Existential Question Time"'s excellent chorus, "Mommy, what's a sex pistol?" Surviving members James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire, and Sean Moore rise to the occasion musically as well, producing some of the band's best music of the past decade, if not longer. Still, though, it's kind of a sad thing to hear, no matter how great a record it is. Even more than the other records they've done since Richey Edwards' presumed death, it is this one that most makes one wish he was still alive, simply by pointing out how much he contributed when he was.

Sonic Youth - The Eternal

I guess the career renaissance that Sonic Youth experienced this decade is becoming something I'm used to. I say that because, unlike the three albums that preceded it, The Eternal did not shock me with its goodness, its solidity. When I had hated everything since Experimental, Jet Set, Trash and No Star, Murray Street was mindblowing--an actual good Sonic Youth record! I thought the time for those was over! Sonic Nurse and Rather Ripped also got my blood flowing--and more importantly, got me to head for the record store with cash in hand, something I didn't hardly do at all in 2009, the year of my personal economic upheaval. Even if I had bought The Eternal, though, I'm not sure I would have played it anywhere near as often as I played the last three Sonic Youth albums. For one, as I said back at the beginning of this paragraph, I've gone back to expecting good records out of Sonic Youth. For another, as solid as The Eternal is, as much as it can stand up on an overall quality level to any of the past three Sonic Youth albums, it has considerably less memorable moments. There aren't any songs on this album that get stuck in my head the way "Pattern Recognition" or "Karen Revisited" or "Or" did on those last three records. It's a very solid album, but I think that solidity comes out as uniformity rather than a collection of peak moments, which leaves me with quite a bit less to take away, even if I do enjoy this album every time I put it on (which doesn't happen all that often). I'm not sure if the fault is mine, for not listening enough, or Sonic Youth's, for making an album that blends into the background a bit too easily. Regardless, this album didn't stick with me the way a lot of their albums have over the years, and while I don't think it's bad, there's definitely something missing here, the absence of which keeps it from attaining the level that the best Sonic Youth stuff easily reaches. [P.S. - I had forgotten that I actually do get "Thunderclap for Bobby Pyn" stuck in my head on occasion, which doesn't change my overall feelings about the album but deserves to be noted.]

Japandroids - Post-Nothing

This is the sort of record that, when it gets hyped, reminds me of how different my listening patterns are from the indie-rock mainstream. When it started getting big, I listened to it, and found it to be a fun record for the most part, especially on the uptempo songs. In fact, starting with "The Boys Are Leaving Town" followed by "Young Hearts Spark Fire," but ending with "Crazy/Forever," "Sovereignty," and "I Quit Girls" may be the only really obvious wrong thing about this record that I can point to. It starts with a glut of energy and ends with a glut of slowed-down haze. The songs should have been sequenced better, and unlike Counting Crows' 2008 effort, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, there wasn't even a thematic reason not to. But whatever, getting away from sequencing and into the songs themselves, yeah, this is fuzzy bassless guitar-pop, and it's pretty well-done. However, for all the babble about noise and distortion among the indie rock faithful, it didn't seem all that noisy to me. Everything is relative, though, and this is an obvious case of my relativity being different from theirs. Bands like Wavves and No Age and these guys probably do seem like a wall of noise overload to kids who spend a lot of time listening to Animal Collective or Grizzly Bear. For dudes like me who spend a significant amount of time listening to Every Time I Die and Das Oath, Japandroids still seem pretty melodically oriented. So, that was a weird thing for me about listening to the dialogue around this record, but it doesn't mean it's any less good. One thing that I did feel made it a bit less good was a discovery I made when I saw these guys play on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon: their songs are, lyrically, insanely repetitive. They played "Wet Hair" on Fallon's show, and hearing the vocals without distortion for the first time, I realized that the song only has three lines, which are just repeated over and over and over again. I'd have to say that the vocal distortion on the album works in their favor, since it kept me from realizing that for several months. If I'd noticed that on first listen, I would probably have liked this record a lot less. And really, I don't love it; when I want to hear a distorted pop record, I generally have many more interesting specimens to turn to. But it's not bad, by any stretch.

Jemina Pearl - Break It Up

So right after the release of their second album, teenage Nashville punk band Be Your Own Pet fell apart. The only people left standing were singer/co-founder Jemina Pearl and drummer John Eatherly, who'd only been in the band for a short period of time. Frustrated but undaunted, the two of them began recording songs together, with Jemina singing and John playing all of the instruments. Eventually, they ended up with enough material to release an album, and Break It Up was the result. To a great extent, it sounds like the third Be Your Own Pet album; the majority of the songs are the same sort of catchy but snotty melodic hardcore/punk that made Be Your Own Pet so fun and memorable. However, there are additional sounds to be found here. "Ecstatic Appeal" is a disco-punk hybrid with a beat like Blondie's "Heart Of Glass" and wonderfully retro glittering synth noises augmenting the rhythm guitar riffs that propel the song. "Nashville Shores" is slower and poppier than most of the tracks on the album, and its chorus features triple-tracked harmonies from Jemina. Unfortunately, the 50s-ish ballad "I Hate People" is a less successful departure, and while one would expect a Jemina Pearl-Iggy Pop duet to be a smashing success, even the combination of the two of them can't overcome the schmaltzy monotony of the song's music. Thankfully, it's the only dud the album has to offer, and it's more than made up for by propulsive bubblegum-punk hits like "Heartbeats," "Band On The Run," and "So Sick," the latter of which closes the album with the sound of Jemina, John, and a studio full of friends energetically making vomit noises. This whole record sounds like it was a blast to make, and it's every bit as much fun to listen to. Jemina and John have recruited a band to play the songs live, and are now on tour. One hopes that regardless of what they call it, they'll keep making fun, energetic music like this.

End of Part One; More to come in a few days!

Can I drive you home?

Engine Kid are interesting to me by virtue of the fact that people pass them over so completely. Considering singer/guitarist Greg Anderson's formidable stoner-rock resume--he's been in Goatsnake, Sunn 0))), and Thorr's Hammer, among quite a few others--you'd think that people would be interested in checking out his earlier bands, especially when they are as musically interesting and tough to pin down as Engine Kid were. Maybe that's the whole problem; unlike anything Anderson is involved in currently, Engine Kid were by no means stoner rock. In fact, though they spent a good bit of time being heavy, their sound was kind of all over the place, as we will discuss shortly. They're a bit of an acquired taste, and that's probably true even for those whose tastes are esoteric enough to draw them to Sunn 0))). Despite all of that, I generally think of Engine Kid as the best band Greg Anderson has ever been a part of. And their final, double-length LP, Angel Wings, is their true masterpiece.



For whatever reason, the vinyl version of Angel Wings features a very different running order than the cassette and CD versions. The tendency among collectors is always to regard the vinyl version as the definitive one, and any deviation from the state of the vinyl to be ersatz. I have this tendency myself, but this once I'm going to go against my usual feeling and take a stand for the cassette/CD running order as the correct one. It might help that I owned the cassette first, and therefore had a chance to get used to it, but I feel sure that even if I'd first acquired the vinyl, I would have understood that the order that placed "Windshield" as the album's opening track is the superior one.

Engine Kid spend a lot of time on Angel Wings being heavy, in intricate and fascinating ways. However, "Windshield" is quite different from anything else here, and plays a somewhat cruel trick on the listener and his/her expectations. It starts out very quietly, with guitar and bass playing a soft, undistorted melody, over which Anderson sings. "In the back of my car, I spent the night," he tells us, and the extreme quiet of the music mirrors the feeling of a groggy early morning, waking up to rays of sunshine in your eyes. He ends the verse by singing, "Sunshine stung my eyes, coming through the windshield," and then the drums come in, slightly increasing the volume of the track as they play along with the guitars and bass. After a brief instrumental passage, there's another quiet verse, and when this one ends, the volume suddenly increases. It's not just that all of the musicians start playing loudly--Anderson singing overtop of the music about being "wakened by a passing train"--but that the track was mixed to get significantly louder at this point. You've been turning up your stereo to hear the quiet verses, and now you get knocked over by a sudden, seemingly intentional volume increase. As soon as it's started, though, the whole loud chorus stops, and there's the briefest second of silence, after which the guitar and bass start playing quietly again. There's one more brief quiet verse, but as soon as you've adjusted to the volume dropping out, it comes back in, even louder and heavier than before. Musically speaking, the band is now playing with about the volume, distortion and heaviness they will use throughout the album, but with Anderson singing rather than screaming overtop of it, repeating, "Can I drive you home?" over and over, the part doesn't sound heavy but rather emotionally intense, with the loud guitars emphasizing the pleading emotional tone of the vocals. It's almost like something Sunny Day Real Estate would do, and I'm sure it's a total surprise to someone who would buy this record expecting stoner rock. At least when it begins the album, it fits as a sort of introduction, bringing you in slowly rather than flinging you right off the deep end. Placed inbetween two other songs on the record, as it is on the vinyl, I'm sure the contrast is even more jarring.

The next nine songs are more in line with the typical Engine Kid sound, which is somewhere between Black Sabbath, Don Caballero, and Rodan. There's still plenty of space for exploration within that sound, though, and the gamut of tracks on Angel Wings makes that abundantly clear. Engine Kid shift from short, heavy instrumental tracks like "Nailgun," "Herbie Hancock," and "A Quinn Martin Production" (the latter of which is an unlisted hidden track on the cassette and CD, and only given a title on the vinyl); to epic explorations that move through multiple moods and time signatures and often stretch to 7 and 8 minute lengths. "Lies Like Knives" is one of these latter epics, and is a dark, ferocious beast with the power of a nighttime electrical storm. As the rhythm section switches between different pounding breakdown riffs, Greg Anderson screams the song's title over and over, wrenching brutal chugging chord sequences from his guitar, which sometimes sounds like a churning piece of heavy machinery and other times falls apart into feedback. This song is probably heavier than anything I've heard on a Goatsnake record, and approaches Sunn 0))) territory at its wildest.



"Expressionists" starts with a strange sequence of riffs that stop and start, propelled by a drum part that fills the empty spaces with rolls that seem unplanned and barely held together, but always fit perfectly into the underlying rhythm. Said underlying rhythm becomes clear after about 45 seconds, when the band finally starts playing together as a unit, with bassist Brian Kraft taking his only lead vocal on the album. His voice is much softer and quieter than Anderson's typically is, but doesn't reach the melodic heights Anderson hits on "Windshield," either. His vocals mix with the chaotic music in a fashion most reminiscent of intricate hardcore bands like Unwound or Drive Like Jehu, a sound that was at its peak in 1994, when Angel Wings was recorded.

"Jumper Cables" is another song that is less heavy than mathematically complex, beginning with a long, ominous section in which Greg Anderson talks rather than sings, narrating a story in the fashion of Slint vocalist Brian MacMahan before beginning to scream when the song gets much heavier around the two-minute mark. Its abrupt transitions from loud to quiet are nothing new for heavy, metallic post-hardcore bands, but the way Engine Kid fit the parts of "Jumper Cables" together makes the whole thing work, achieving the integration of Slint and Rodan's epic horror movie narratives and the pounding, noisy crescendoes that those bands rarely bothered to write.

"Anchor" begins with bagpipes, which soon give way to another quiet, foreboding riff, over which Anderson mumbles bizarre, disconnected imagery. Once this song gets heavy, though, it very rarely returns to the quiet moments, instead locking into a tremendously complicated series of interconnected heavy riffs that fit together in ways not immediately obvious to the listener. This is pure math-rock at its heaviest, with Engine Kid using stops and starts to make the whole thing that much more tortured. By halfway through the song, Greg Anderson is struggling to spit out lyrics like "Dog brain--take the A train," as the instruments--including, one must assume, his own--bark out disconnected chords, chopping his lyrics apart at seemingly random but obviously planned-out intervals. Each of these choppy verses ends with Anderson screaming over silence, "...and never come..." On the word "BACK!" the whole band is suddenly playing again, sweeping his vocals away on a powerful tide of heavy noise.

The album ends with a 13 minute cover of John Coltrane's "Ole," which is the spiritual opposite of its opening track, "Windshield." Where that song was Engine Kid at their most accessible, presenting a melodic, emotional indie rock song not that far removed from the sound of, say, Sunny Day Real Estate [Random trivia: Greg Anderson and SDRE bassist Nate Mendel were both in a straight edge hardcore band called Brotherhood in the late 80s, when both were teenagers], "Ole" is Engine Kid at their farthest out, taking their mathematically inclined metallic post-hardcore aesthetic to its logical conclusion: dark, pounding, free jazz. Earlier in 1994, Engine Kid had released a split LP with Iceburn, and Iceburn's contribution had been two 15-minute tracks in which they explored different variations on a theme from Stravinsky's "The Rite Of Spring." While Engine Kid were not anywhere near as far-out as Iceburn tended to get, it's not hard to imagine how hearing those Iceburn tracks might have influenced the decision to record "Ole." The trio of full-time Engine Kid members basically relegate themselves to the rhythm section during the song, bringing in Bill Herzog [still a Sunn 0))) collaborator] to hold down the groove on upright bass, and John Phelps and Tim Midgett of the band Silkworm to play alto sax and trumpet, respectively. Phelps and Midgett are all over the place, soloing throughout the track, but they are strangely sidelined by Engine Kid themselves, who stick to the basic chords of the song but slowly play them more and more heavily, until their rhythmic pounding has made you forget all about the horns. Using distortion pedals and the unrelenting style that they've learned from hardcore and metal, they create a powerful rhythmic pulse of a variety rarely, if ever, heard in straight-up jazz music. They don't turn "Ole" into a hardcore or metal song, though; they preserve the feel and structure of the Coltrane original, honoring it with a new, updated take on it even as they make clear, by virtue of the energy and emotion they pour into it, how much respect they have for the original version. It could be said that they breathe some much-needed life into a mostly dead genre here. That is, one could say that if it were clear that it had an effect on jazz as a whole. Fifteen years after its release, just the opposite is true: it's clear that it had no effect at all.

Engine Kid are a band of extreme shifts in genre, mood, and tempo, and no matter what feel they are exploring on a particular song, they always create a challenging piece of music. Considering Greg Anderson's more recent rise to fame, perhaps it would be most correct to say that Engine Kid were ahead of their time. Or maybe the problem is that they haven't been packaged correctly, or put in front of the right group of people, to find their natural audience. Whatever the explanation, though, it remains true to say that Engine Kid deserve much more credit than they get, if not for being influential, then at least for being a creative and consistently excellent band.

Engine Kid - "Windshield," "Anchor," "Expressionists"

ENGINE KID - "Windshield" from Revelation Records on Vimeo.

Nick And Norah's Mediocre Playlist.

I think it was with "Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist" that the prevailing tide of opinion, at least in indie and alt-rock circles, turned against Michael Cera. Sure, there had been some complaints about his characters in "Superbad" and "Juno," that he was just recycling Arrested Development's George Michael character over and over. But you could still find some people to defend both of those movies, and plenty of people willing to defend the earlier "Garden State," in which the Michael Cera role is played by proto-Michael Cera Zach Braff. "Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist," though, was greeted with derision in every place I read or heard people talking about it. Maybe the film found its audience in a younger cross-section of wide-eyed teenagers, or maybe it was just a flop; I haven't seen the numbers, so I don't know. But in the demographic group that was its target market, it seemed to be universally hated.

I didn't rush out and see it, so I didn't know the exact reason for all the hatred. But I could make an educated guess. These kind of accelerated nostalgia movies have been pretty popular lately, and the thing they do--selling a romanticized portrayal of who you are right now back to you--is a risky move. It's easy to go too precious (or maybe too silly) and make everyone want to barf ("Juno"'s mistake according to those who didn't like it). It's easy to go too mawkish and make everyone hate themselves for seeing themselves in the characters ("Garden State"'s tragic error). Walking the tightrope between the two, striking the right notes without overdoing it, is tough, and it doesn't seem like anyone from the indie-rock generation has quite done it yet.

The accusation I heard about "Nick And Norah" was that the characters were such dorky, wussy little indie rockers that everyone watching the film just wanted to shake them. Particularly Michael Cera--I kept hearing about how his character needed to "man up." Maybe this was what activated the masochistic streak in my brain, or maybe it was just that I had to see what it was about this movie that made everyone who saw it hate it so much. Regardless, the more I heard bad things about this movie, the more curious about it I got.

I wasn't going to go out of my way to see it, but I'm unemployed right now, and my Netflix account is still working, so I took advantage of the Watch Instantly feature and booted it up on my laptop tonight. And I was expecting downright horrible trash, which is probably why I found myself at least somewhat pleasantly surprised. It's really rare that movies, or any works of art, that people condemn as godawful are actually as bad as everyone says. Usually they're only mediocre, and when you're expecting awfulness, mediocrity can be a pleasant surprise. I'm not saying "Nick And Norah" was mediocre either, by the way. I didn't love it, or even like it all the way through, but my analysis of it is more complicated than that.

Let me warn you right off that I'm going to get spoilerific from here on in; I really have to if I want to make my points. There are a few twists in the movie's plot that I'm glad I didn't know about in advance, so if you want to watch this movie at some point, you might want to skip this review until you've done so.

OK, now that that's out of the way: "Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist" begins with separate introductions to our two titular characters. Nick (Michael Cera) plays in a band, currently called the Jerkoffs, in which he is the only non-gay member. He's been broken up with his last girlfriend for over a month and is still desperately pining for her. The ex-girlfriend, Tris, goes to school with Norah, and Norah has developed the habit of grabbing the mix CDs Nick makes for Tris out of the trash when Tris throws them away. This has made her curious about Nick, whose musical taste she really likes.

That evening, Nick's band has a gig opening for Bishop Allen. This is where my first big problem with this movie comes in. The setup for Nick, Nick's band, Norah, Norah's drunken best friend Caroline, and Tris to all end up at the club together is that the enigmatic but popular local band Where's Fluffy are playing a secret show somewhere in town that night, and they're all looking for the gig's location. The Where's Fluffy plot thread runs throughout the movie, and it's totally lame. This is supposed to be a somewhat realistic movie about indie kids, right? I guess that's questionable, since about 25% of it deviates dramatically from that template, but whatever, that's what it is most of the time. The Where's Fluffy thing, though, is a plot device out of some completely unrealistic 80s movie. It makes me think of "Empire Records" or "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," and as much as I love both of those movies, "Nick And Norah" sets itself up as a different sort of movie, and the sort of plot threads that work well in 80s movies just seem unnatural and shoehorned in.

But whatever, everyone's at the club together, Norah and Nick meet and hit it off, and Tris gets jealous (even though she's there with a new boyfriend). This sets up the intrinsic conflict of the entire movie--the decision to move towards a new and interesting but uncertain possibility, or to try and stick with a previous love interest for a while longer even though it's not really working out. I think this is a great idea around which to structure a movie about teenagers/early-twentysomethings, and a lot of the things that happen in "Nick and Norah" could have happened in a really great movie about this exact concept. The problem here is that the execution is all wrong. I find myself liking most of the characters in the movie--though, truth to tell, Nick's passivity is a bit problematic and probably explains a lot of the grief Michael Cera got about this movie. I can't deny that the frustratingly weak-willed indie boy stereotype has a grain of truth in it, and even that some of the passive things Nick does in the movie ring true (though others definitely don't), but it's a frustrating experience to watch it go down. In a way, I feel like there's a perverse streak running through "Nick And Norah"; like the writers and director intended to create a certain amount of frustration with the characters in their audience. There's a lot more honesty in watching Nick and Norah be passive, refuse to take risks and act on their feelings, and visibly give up (as both characters do multiple times over the course of the movie) than there is in typical romantic comedies, where characters say and do the things that you only wish you would say or do in the same situations.

Again, the problem is execution. Every tiny little moment in which this movie extracts a grain of uncomfortable truth from a human interaction is immediately overwhelmed by half a dozen awkward, overdone bits that all pile overtop of the honest moment and drown it out. Sometimes this happens due to the filmmakers' attempts to throw jokes and comic relief into the film, which never works, and sometimes it's because they force some indie cliche or another and just end up with yet another out-of-place "Empire Records" moment. By the way, I was uncomfortable with how little distinction there seemed to be between the indie scene that was being portrayed and the totally mainstream attitudes and behaviors of many of the characters. I admit that I might just be showing my age, because it does seem like the indie scene circa 2009 is a lot more business-oriented and mainstream than it was when I first got involved. My feeling, though, was that the filmmakers got it wrong, and that made it hard for me to suspend my disbelief at points.

Things started to improve over the last quarter or so of the movie. There was about a 20 minute period in which Nick and Norah interacted by themselves instead of in a crowd, and for the first time in the entire movie, I got drawn in. I stopped wondering when the next stupid thing that would strain my suspension of disbelief was going to happen, and instead found myself caring about and relating to the characters. If the whole movie had been as well-done as this section was, it would have been quite good. Even this section was sort of invaded by the movie's regular detours into corniness, though. There was some sexual contact between Nick and Norah, and while I appreciated the directorial decision to focus on the musical equipment in the room rather than showing the sex scene, there were still hints back to obnoxious earlier dialogue about Norah's never having had an orgasm, which tarnished the scene a bit.

Based on talk I heard before seeing the movie, I had expected the whole thing to end without Nick and Norah getting together, and for the lack of connection between the two of them to be specifically Michael Cera's fault. There were points where it seemed like that's where things were going, and I wasn't happy about that, but in the end, Nick and Norah did hook up, and it seemed like the characters would start dating. Both of them took the risk and ditched their not-quite-exes, rather than staying locked into the cycle of someone not liking them but not wanting them to move on, either. Falling into that cycle is a common problem, more common than people like to admit, and it's good to see a movie at least trying to tackle these issues. A different movie, a better movie, would have done so a lot more successfully than "Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist" did. As it is, "Nick And Norah" is a film in which two likeable characters, both of whom are uncomfortably lifelike at times, do their best to wade through a surfeit of implausible plot points. Their success is intermittent, at best. The same could be said for the entire movie.

The nuggets of the future?

I've got a new car, for the first time in almost a year. It's been a strange adjustment, because only now, after having it for a few weeks, am I starting to realize that I can go to places in 5 minutes that took me half an hour to reach on my bike, which makes me a lot more likely to actually go to those places. As a result of that realization, tonight I decided to go to Sheetz and score some food from the automated touch-screen menu thing, which I love.

Here's what this post has to do with music: I have a cassette player in my car. When I say it's new, I really just mean it's new to me--it's from 1996, a year back when it didn't yet seem that weird to put a cassette player in a car. These days I imagine that most of the ones that are still in use are just being used to run adapters plugged into Ipods, but I'm old enough and enough of a packrat that I still have the huge collection of cassettes that I built up starting in my childhood (the mid-80s) and continuing until about 2005, when even used cassettes started disappearing from record stores. Since I got this car less than two weeks before becoming unemployed, I couldn't spare the cash to buy an adapter for my Ipod, so right now I'm driving around listening to tapes. These days I mostly listen to music on my computer (for better or for worse), so a lot of the tapes I've pulled out in the last couple of weeks for driving music are things I haven't heard in years.

Tonight I was listening to a mix tape I made in 2003 or thereabouts, close to the end of the era in which I listened to cassettes on the regular. I was just starting to burn CDs regularly, and when I got a car in spring 2004 that had a CD player in it, I started listening to those burned CDs whenever I was away from my computer. My walkman started gathering dust, as did my cassette collection in general. The mix tape I was listening to tonight might be the last mix tape I ever made, and if it's not, it's close to it. Anyway, I was listening to the tape in the dark, and couldn't really check the tracklist, so it was fun trying to figure out what I was hearing as each new song came on. Some of them were immediately recognizable tunes that I still listen to today, but others were things I hadn't heard since not long after making the tape. The track listing spoke well for my tastes six years ago, because none of the songs I'd forgotten about made me think, "What was I thinking with this song?" Instead I kept thinking, "I forgot how good this song was!"

The song that blew my mind the most tonight was one I heard as I was getting home. I recognized it immediately despite having not heard it in years, because it was very distinctive. The song was "Til The End" by Haven, from their album "Between The Senses." I'd bought this album from Tower Records, back when they were still around. I used to like going into Tower and listening to all of the CDs they had on the listening stations. They used to have one particular listening station that was all CDs priced at $9.99 or less, and I found a lot of awesome albums by random bands that I'd never heard of on that station. Haven came from there, but so did the first Ours album, The Coral's "The Invisible Invasion," and "Interventions And Lullabies" by The Format. Some of these are still remembered now, but that Haven CD isn't one of them. It may have been issued by a major label, but it wasn't a success, even on a cult level. The band released one more album on their British label, which wasn't picked up in America, and then broke up. Their website is a dead link these days, and as I listened to "Til The End," I had the passing thought that I'm probably the only person who still remembers it.

That's when I had the epiphany that I referenced in the title. On some level, I thought, isn't Haven comparable to the bands that took part in the garage/psych explosion of the 60s? Haven's sound mixes the leftovers of 90s alternative rock with a strong shoegaze influence and a wide-ranging vocalist who obviously took some cues from Jeff Buckley. In the wake of the success of bands like Coldplay and Travis, a lot of bands that sounded exactly like this were probably getting signed. Ours, who I mentioned earlier, were along the same lines, though with more of a Smashing Pumpkins influence. There are plenty of others I could cite, too, going back to the post-Nirvana grunge gold rush and moving forward up to right now, with the current attempt to find the new My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy in full swing. A lot of these bands are completely forgotten within 5 to 10 years of their first release, and while many of them make albums that are inconsistent at best, most of them will have at least one really good song buried somewhere in their discography.

Take Haven, for example. "Til The End" is the third track on "Between The Senses," and other than the opener, "Let It Live," it's the only track that really stands out. If I'd chosen to listen to tracks 5 and 7 instead of tracks 1 and 3 when this CD was on Tower's listening station, I probably wouldn't have bought it. But considering the joy I still get out of "Til The End," I feel like it was a worthwhile purchase. The song starts with a quiet single-note guitar intro, over which vocalist Gary Briggs croons the first verse. The lyrics aren't too great, and he mostly repeats the same verse and chorus throughout the song, but when the rest of the band joins with the lead guitar halfway through the verse, the mixture of the simple minor-chord riffing with the melodic lead guitar and Briggs's high, crooning vocals creates an understated yet catchy feel. As the song moves into its pre-chorus, the drums become more powerful, and push things towards a stronger, more driving chorus. However, Gary Briggs never sings any more forcefully. Instead, he goes higher, adding to the passion of the chorus by hitting surprising soprano notes. My favorite part of the entire song is when, on the chorus, he sings the line "Lately I'm sure, words won't implore you to stay," emphasizing the internal rhyme on the words "sure" and "implore" by hitting an impossibly high falsetto note on the first word, then moving to an even higher harmony on the second word. These kinds of vocal tricks won't be for everyone--if you can't handle a bit of fey grandiosity, you're better off with a Husker Du record--but if you can get on their wavelength, Haven have a lot to offer. At least on this song.

And that's the kind of story that I've discovered most of the time when I've gone digging deeper into the careers of garage/psych bands from the 60s who have one or two songs that I fucking love. Take the Count Five, for example, whose "Psychotic Reaction" is one of the most famous Nuggets of all time. Lester Bangs, in his "Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung" essay, promised me an entire album of garage awesomeness where that first single came from, but when I hunted down the Count Five's other recorded work, I mostly got embarrassingly inept crap (though I will give credit to "Double Decker Bus"). I should have known not to trust Bangs on this one, though, considering that the rest of the essay discussed four other Count Five albums that unfortunately never existed. Anyway, the point is that, like Haven, Count Five's career didn't have much depth to it. They're remembered for one song, and that's probably all they should be remembered for. So who's to say that, in 20 more years or so, there won't be a similar movement to preserve fondly the memories of all the lesser alt/pop/rock bands from our own time? I sure hope there is, at least. I'd love to hear a four-CD box set of post-grunge pseudo-Jeff Buckley shoegazers, each playing their one good song. Of course, by the time all of this happens, the box set won't be CD, but whatever format comes two steps after blu-ray, and I'll be experiencing a four-dimensional virtual reality immersion that makes me feel like I'm playing bass for whatever band I'm listening to. Which sounds pretty cool, come to think of it.

Haven - "Til The End" and "Let It Live"