Album: C I V I L W a R

Artist: Dillinger Four

Label: Fat Wreck Chords (2008)

Runtime: 13 songs, ~ 39 minutes

Back to perfect punk album time. This here is the 9th entry in the series. And my second one outside the 1990s [By the way, since I’ve launched this blog in late June, I’ve been running at a post a week. I’d love to keep this going, but it’s a pace that I know, sooner or later, is gonna run me out. I don’t know when. Next week. Next month. Will it be a tree falling in the forest? Will anyone notice? Who knows.]

But I’m here to talk perfect punk albums. This one, I’m intending to give straight: Dillinger Four’s Civil War. What do I mean by doing it straight? Well, I’m not sure I have a real personal tie to this record or this band, other than that it just being damn good. I don’t know the guys in the band. Never played a show with them. Heck, never even seen them live. Surprisingly perhaps, because they are a heavyweight, but never did. Maybe because they were most active in the 2000s, which, while I was playing regularly with Dear Tonight and then Young Lady, and doing some tours with Boysetsfire, I don’t honestly remember going to a lot of other shows at this point in my life. Maybe it’s because I was also working full-time and busy with volunteer political organizing, with meetings or projects multiple times a week. But it was also a period of my life where I felt, well, burned out. Is that a strange thing to say, to experience? Being burned out in your 20s? That’s supposed to be the time when you are soaring high and running 100 miles an hour. I mean, I was doing a lot, but that may have been what it was. I was just drained and didn’t realize it. Drinking, drugs, and romances served as a form of self-medication, but each ultimately just left me feeling emptier. To some degree, being in my 20s, working a political job, playing and touring in bands, and doing activism all while in New York City was just, well, a lot. So, anyway, I don’t really remember going to shows all that much, at least when I wasn’t playing them. Maybe that’s why I never saw Dillinger Four. But it may also be the simple fact that I didn’t really dig into them, and this album in particular, until about a decade or so after it got released. It’s funny, the way sometimes albums play out like this. I heard singles and certain tracks, but never fully sat and listened to the album until maybe around 2019 or so, and started listening to it while going on runs. Maybe, and quite likely, I had fallen prey to the streaming demon. I was fed single tracks, and I’d put them on playlists or just bought those one or two songs and never really digested and sat with an album. That was especially true of much new music during the 2000s. Maybe that’s another reason for my 1990s bias (see my last post): simply that I know those albums much better than the ones that came after. Could be. Whatever the reason, this album for me is just, well, the album. No relationship, no girl, no friend, no brother, no coming of age, nothing. It’s just an album that’s perfect.

But there I went. Said I had no personal connection to this album and then went on an inner monologue about why that could be. I swear this is not just for myself. I have to believe I’m not alone in these experiences. Is this thing on? Is anyone out there?

It is surprising to me that this is not, in fact, the beloved Dillinger Four album. While people praised it, there was also a lot of criticism. Claims that it was too polished, too form-fitting, lacking the urgency of Midwestern Songs of America, which D4 released a decade earlier. Those reviews are simply wrong. Sorry, Alternative Press and The A.V. Club. You swung and missed. Plus, this album has one of, maybe, my top five favorite punk songs (definitely top ten), “A PYRE LAID for IMAGE and FRAME.”

As I am going to write this straight, I realize that what I want to write about and what I love about this record, is that these songs are not written straight. What I’ve come to appreciate and love about Dillinger Four and what gets captured on this album so well is that they take the foundation of punk - pop punk, punk rock, even some melodic hardcore - and they tinker with it and evolve it. When I listen to this album, I hear echoes of Jawbreaker, Superchunk, Naked Raygun, Screeching Weasel, Leatherface, The Wedding Present, J Church, Lifetime. Contemporaries like Off With Their Heads, The Ergs, The Lawrence Arms. They embody clear punk melodies, themes, and features, but their songs are constructed differently. The D4 composition is about a variation rather than circular steps. The songs don’t always go A-B-A-B, or lazily repeat each phrase the same exact way each time through. Yes, it’s true that there are other punk bands that do this to some degree, but I just love the way they do it across this album. Let me break down some, and you’ll see their formula play out. And when I say formula, I don’t mean they’re formulaic or boring, but rather, there is a method at play here. They took what came before them, put their own stamp on it, and built out the songs in these divergent ways, which keeps them interesting, fresh-sounding, and energetic.

D4 is able to play this off so well, I think, because it’s a mix. It’s a hybrid of sorts. They certainly repeat parts and verses return, and choruses often serve as hooks. But within those structures, they vary things out, and they change those structures at times, too.

There are a few musical concepts and terms for these more divergent forms of song composition that I’ll outline as a way to discuss and understand the album. For me, the three that get closer to what Dillinger Four does on this album are developing variation, asymmetric phrase lengths, and phrase expansion.

Developing variation is a term coined by Arnold Schoenberg, the Viennese composer (1874-1951), in his review of German music from Brahms onward. [Note: Schoenberg was renowned for creating a 12-tone method where instead of resolving dissonance in expected ways, all 12 notes would play so that none repeat until each had its turn. In this way, no key could assert itself. He would end up fleeing Austria because of Hitler and settle in California as a professor, where he taught, among others, John Cage. Cecil Taylor, the great jazz pianist pioneer, would point to Schoenberg as inspiration for his own take on jazz, as he helped launch free jazz.] He isolated and identified this approach in arguing that it serves as the music’s real engine. Rather than repetition, the engine was a continuous transformation in which a theme returns altered, and that alteration is where the piece actually lives. D4 does this in miniature on this album (again embracing the three-minute pop structure but altering within it).

The other central piece is asymmetric phrase lengths. Pop songs, which punk rock largely builds from, runs on four- and eight- bar phrases. Writing five or seven, or clipping to three is called asymmetric phrase lengths or phrase asymmetry. It names what, as a listener, you can feel as it creates the unique motion and flow of the song but you’d need to go count to really locate.

Phrase expansion is when a musical phrase lasts longer than anticipated, usually by delaying its final cadence. It’s similar to phrase asymmetry in that it alters the standard four- and eight- bar phrases and helps create an added sense of depth or emotional tension within the music.

The thing I love about this album though is that Dillinger Four pull off these styles almost without notice. I think it’s possible to listen to the album, love it and sing along, without realizing that you’re doing it to song structures that break from the standard. Perhaps, this speaks to their quality. They can write songs with divergent structures and yet still make them catchy as hell. In part, it’s because they still rely upon a lot of the well established elements. Pick slides when you want pick slides. Ahhs and ohhs where you want ahhs and ohhs. Again, it’s a hybrid. D4 also invokes the older punk (and hip hop) practice of kicking songs off with samples from movies, shows, or elsewhere (see, for instance, two tracks off previous perfect punk album entries, Jawbreaker’s “Condition Oakland” or Spirit Assembly’s “Simple Transaction” or “Ostrichsized” by Lifetime or “Both Guns Blazing” by Bane or countless others). The opening sample, in my view, speaks directly to the way they write their songs: “One additional word of advice: you have to listen closely or you can easily get behind when listening to this record.”

We don’t really see these elements kick off until about halfway through the third song. The first two follow standard pop song structures and sound like standard, albeit very well done, punk songs. To me, it plays like these first two are needed as warm ups (in fact if you want to hear the standard that they diverge from, listen to these first two tracks). Something to get the gears turning, the juices flowing, so that by halfway through the third song (and one of the album’s best) “parishiltonisametaphor” we start to see some of the divergence emerge within the song structures. Which, as I write out their song titles now, I can’t help but think of the similarities between what I’m trying to describe and how they write many of their song titles. Their phrases and words compacted into one giant word, the changes between lowercase to ALL CAPS words. Variation when you wouldn’t expect it.

Take “Gainesville.” It’s one of the more melodic songs on the record, and sounds the most like a straight-ahead pop punk song, but it’s also one where they “cheat” perhaps the most. The whole song is built out of one four-chord phrase. A, E, D, B. You hear it in the first line of the first verse, and it sounds completely ordinary, because A to E to D is about as plain as punk gets. Except that fourth chord. In the key of A, that B is supposed to be a B minor. They play it major. One chord, and the whole phrase tips toward a key that feels fresh. The song is a variation of this phrase over the rest of the song. Three lines later, still in the first verse, it comes back with the B lopped off. Just A, E, D, and you’re waiting for the fourth chord, but it doesn’t show up.

What’s more is that the verse splits into two halves that both land on the same two chords, G and D. Both halves are eight bars and have the same frame twice. But the first half fits three lines of words into it, and the second fits four. Both run the same descent underneath, A down to G# down to G, but the second pass wedges B minor and A in front of it. That insertion is interpolation, and what it does is leave the G# standing on a line of its own. That’s the second chord in the verse that isn’t in the key, after the B. The first time through, it’s tucked in behind an A, and you may barely register it. The second time it’s out in the open.

Then the chorus plays the phrase twice in a row, which is the only place in the entire song where anything repeats itself exactly. The third time through, singing the same words, the chords underneath change. A, F, F# minor, D. The F isn’t in the key either. Same line, same melody, but now with a different floor. This is one of their principal methods on display. One idea, but turned over and over and not allowed to sit still. This is developing variation. Of course, Schoenberg was talking about Brahms, and I am here talking about a punk band from Minneapolis whose lyrics seem like half bar jokes.

But back to “parishiltoisametaphor,” which has a ton of moving parts. As I mentioned, the place where you feel it turn is in the second interlude. The first interlude is just the intro figure, C# minor to A to E, played twice. The second one, however, goes to a different cell. A, C# minor, A, F# minor, which is played three times until it’s altered the fourth time around. In this song, the band goes back and rewrites its own filler section, which most bands don’t bother to do. There is variation in the verses as well. The progression has an A major 7th with the 7th underneath it (the A/G# chord), largely felt with the bass stepping down, and goes all the way down to F#. This is close to a jazz voicing embedded within a punk song, and is a similar descending gesture as in “Gainesville.” The outro bridge then takes on an asymmetric phrasing, mostly bouncing between A-E-A, but then introducing a D chord until the end when a F# drops in.

At the other end of the spectrum, they make their plainest song structure interesting through the drums. The chord progression in “MINIMUM WAGE IS a GATEWAY DRUG” is D, A, B minor, G. This is the prototypical, four-chord progression underneath songs like “Let It Be” or “Don’t Stop Believin’.” In other words, it’s ordinary. D4 plays it twice through the verse without any substitution or something outside the key on the guitars. What changes, though, are the drums. Halfway through the verse, on the second time of those four chords, the drums double up. The snare hits on every beat instead of every other. (D4 has their own internal language, usually creating onomatopoeia, for songwriting elements. They call this the “taco” beat as a rhythmic mnemonic for the way the drums end up sounding.) The tempo hasn’t changed, but it makes the song feel like it’s running twice as fast. Even though it’s the same basic chord progression, it doesn’t sound the same anymore. They do a similar technique on drums in “AMERICASPREMIEREFWITHBASEDINITIATIVE.”

In a 2019 interview marking their 25th anniversary as a band, guitarist and vocalist Erik Funk discussed this method directly. “Normally, the way D4 thinks is,” he says, “Well, if you have something that’s too catchy, you have to mix in a really atonal part. You have to sabotage that song somehow.”

“Fruity Pebbles” is another great example. It’s in the key of G. The first time through the verse, it rides G for several measures, until it bounces up to D and drops down to C. This is V to IV, moving backward. The chorus ten opens on E major. This is some of the sabotage Funk mentioned, since in G the chord on that degree should be E minor. E major introduces G# in a song that has no G# anywhere in its scale. This is the same kind of swap as the B in “Gainesville.” They take the diatonic minor chord and play it major instead. After the chorus is the bridge, featuring seven chords played straight through: B flat, A, G, B flat, A, C, D. This is the same three-chord cell done twice, but the second time it climbs instead of continuing down. This change anticipates the atonal return that happens the second time around in the verse, where, after the drop from D to C, you get a short, and beautiful step down of Bb to A before resolving back in the G. Man, I love that. The bridge got into both of them, so the material spread rather than simply regurgitating.

But stepping out of the music theory for a moment, I just want to say this is such a fun record. The melodies, both vocals and guitars, the rhythms on drums and guitars, the tempo changes, and the sing-along vocals. It’s damn catchy. Even when the lyrics deal with hurt, the songs juxtapose upbeat and poppy instrumentals. If I want an album that will get me in a good mood, head nodding, and foot tapping along, it’s this one. I think there’s a reason the opening sample on the first track ends by saying, “We’ll soon have you disco dancing with the best.” My one main critique? They most certainly should’ve ended the album with “Like Eye Contact In an Elevator.” It’s a perfect album closer. Emphatic. Unrelenting. I can imagine the band and audience alike exhausted, spent, at the end. But maybe this is just more sabotage, as instead they close with “down Cars On Cinder Blocks,” which ends on an unresolved chord progression. It feels like an ellipsis. Shouldn’t something come next? Well, for me, the only answer is to do what that initial sample says, “go back to the beginning of the cut and start over,” and start the album again.

Thank you again for coming along for this ride.

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I started writing this post while drafting my “perfect punk album” post #8 about Social Distortion’s Sex, Love & Rock ‘n’ Roll, and I realized that, eight entries into that series, it was my first album outside the 1990s. After three paragraphs or so of exploring why that could be, I realized I should just peel it out, work on it a bit, and keep it for its own post. So here it is.

But the thing I’m exploring here started well before I started drafting that post. It’s a question that has been posed to Courtney, Allen, and me multiple times by everyone, friends, family, fans, interviewers, since Eldritch Anisette agreed to work with Numero Group to reissue our material, which was recorded in 1996 and originally released in 1997. “What is it about this time period, this music, the ‘90s, that explains this renaissance of sorts?” My own question explored here is maybe a bit more introspective, self-centered, and simpler than that: why are my perfect punk album selections thus far (oh, and certainly the ones to come) dominated by releases from that decade? Am I being lazy? Is it selection bias? Or is it something else, something more?

My first six entries included releases from Spirit Assembly, Sunny Day Real Estate, Lungfish, Superchunk, Jawbreaker, and His Hero Is Gone. I made a post about five honorable mentions, albums I really wanted to pass the test, but just fell short by a track or two. Again, the ‘90s. Seaweed, Mineral, Team Dresch, Avail, Neurosis. Eleven albums, all from the same decade. And they feel like just the tip of the iceberg of albums left to consider and explore. Most of the ones people encourage me to consider also fall within these years.

It may very well be that I’ve been focusing there because of my own generational bias. If you’ve been following along by now, you know that I came of age in punk rock starting around 1993, at 13, and was fully submerged by the next year. That said, I remained actively playing in bands and setting up shows all the way through 2012 (and started back up this year). Don’t those 12+ years of being involved in music outside of the ‘90s mean anything? Wouldn’t I have bias there? Wouldn’t that water down this anchoring in the ‘90s that is emerging? But still, maybe it’s reverence to those early years and initial albums that one heard and listened to on repeat: the times, places, people, memories associated with it, the freshness of the sound, the excitement of early personal discoveries, the simple association of coming of age and figuring yourself out while establishing a soundtrack that goes with it. There’s a lot to be said about the affinities we have for a record that changed things for us. Could be. After all, I can’t seem to escape a perfect punk album entry without attaching some of my own personal experience and memoir to it.

Like generational or selection bias, it could also be survivorship bias. The ‘90s had thousands of forgettable records, and we only remember, or I only write about, the good ones. The perfect ones, in fact. I think every decade faces this, though, and this one offers an unusually strong crop of perfect albums.

But I’m going with the simpler and perhaps more provocative proposition that the ‘90s simply churned out incredible punk albums and held the right enabling conditions for cultural production through DIY punk music that stands in its own spotlight. The scene was still incredibly vibrant and emerging. Subgenres and aesthetics were still being refined, if not outright created. Pop punk, hardcore, hardcore punk, melodic hardcore, post-hardcore, crust punk, emo, power violence, screamo, skramz, and more that I forget, forgot, never knew was a label, or still don’t understand what it is. Fugazi’s Repeater kicked it off in 1990. Fugazi was still playing! Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come was released in 1998. There was so much innovation and creation packed within a dense cluster of years. Maybe that’s because there was solid footing to stand on - that classic ‘70s punk, the launch of hardcore in the ‘80s, and the initial waves of subgenres, most notably emo. I don’t intend to dismiss or disparage the music that came before. And there will be albums from those years. But what I’m saying is that they already existed and gave the 1990s a footing to stand on, without sinking you into it. Solid footing with room for roots, but also to grow and diverge. What I’m saying is that it hadn’t fully developed or saturated. Now, I don’t mean any disrespect to the 2000s onward. It’s not that the 2000s-on are without experimentation and evolution, but for the ‘90s, while there was a musical lineage to draw from, there wasn’t too much that it’d act as quicksand to pull you under, or clouds to cover you up from the light. To some degree, it makes it harder to stand out on your own when the referentials may drag you under rather than lift you up.

While major labels had been consuming earlier punk from bands like The Ramones and The Clash, the ‘90s also marked the period when they launched a buying spree. Nirvana helped kick a door in, and then Green Day blew it off its hinges. Others were signed in hopes they’d be the next big thing - Jawbox, Jawbreaker, Samiam, Bad Religion, Shudder to Think, Jimmy Eat World. With majors breathing down the scene’s neck, it also drew sharper lines (for better or for worse, sometimes) as to what the music was, and how it should continue to evolve. And some bands that were offered refused it. Fugazi, Superchunk, Rancid. HearttaCk refused to review any record with a barcode (remember that?).

There was also a battle within the scene for who belonged and whose voice would be heard. I don’t mean to say that this had to be necessary or was even worth it, but I think that the fight over who belonged also produced some of the best bands and records, whether they be Los Crudos, Dahlia Seed, Team Dresch, or others. The determination, the passion, and, of course, the talent simply shine through.

But there’s lots more to it, too.

There was a thriving ecosystem of independent labels, clubs, zines, and more. The DIY ecosystem was at full force. You could set up shows for your favorite bands. You could see your favorite bands play on the floor of your local VFW hall or church. You could set the shows up. Did you like a band? You simply wrote them and said, “Hey, I can give you gas money, food, and a place to sleep,” and chances were they’d say yes. I have some receipts to show for it, too. And if not you, there was still a rich selection of independent music venues in most towns, including ones willing to cater to underground bands and all-ages shows. And bands would often be booking these shows themselves, with little mediation from agents. There was even a regularly updated zine to help you do this, Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life.

Does that create better albums? I think it does. It both leads to and is representative of a thriving and healthy cultural ecosystem. It allows access, experimentation, a ready feedback loop, and exchange. It’s an enabling environment. Maybe it’s similar to when people talk about certain periods of dense cultural production: the 1920s Parisian jazz age, the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, the 1940s bebop scene in New York, the early 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene (okay, I may have a New York bias, too). You have, in each of these, a dense environment of deep dedication to the art and the craft. A heightened accessibility for creators and audiences, and where there wasn’t one, people just created it themselves. The exchange and constant iteration-reiteration, the give-take, borrow-steal. Even though gatekeeping and snobbery existed, there was a sense that the more the better.

Now, of course, one unique aspect of the period I’m talking about, compared with Harlem or Paris in the ‘20s, is its geographic expanse. Harlem and Paris worked because you could walk across a neighborhood, sit in the same cafe, and walk down the street to the other loft space or club. But here, it’s not just concentrated in a city or a neighborhood within a city. It was U.S.-wide. Yes, it was anchored in local nodes that allowed refinement and, if you will, cultural hubs to emerge. San Diego, D.C., Chicago, Delaware, Louisville, the Bay Area, Richmond, Syracuse, Columbus, Little Rock, Gainesville. But the ‘scene’ was bigger than any one place. True, one could even make a case that it extended beyond the U.S. I haven’t even gotten into the bands and connections outside the US, whether Shotmaker or Propagandhi from Canada, Jasmine from France, Refused from Sweden, Seein’ Red from Holland, Acme from Germany, Bob Tilton from England. But here and now I’m talking about the U.S., but I do mean the entire continental U.S. How could such a cultural milieu be so dense and yet so geographically expansive? But if you’ve been reading my posts up until this point you’ll know what I’m about to say: we created not just “a scene,” but a community, a network, often problematic and not without its issues (oh trust me, there were plenty), but a self-directed, independent, underground network of punk cultural creators, audiences, curators, participants. The network served the neighborhood’s function. I talked about the DIY punk pen pal network in my perfect punk album post on His Hero Is Gone’s Monuments to Thieves. People you’d meet at shows, you’d stay in touch with. If you really liked a zine, chances are you’d write the creator, and they’d write back. Same with bands and labels. There was accessibility, but even more than that, there was connection. Connection was the point. Just like I discussed in my post on the first expo of the Delaware Music History Archive, participation and creation weren’t just from the bands, and the net result of all of that was something like community. And maybe, perhaps, the slow form it took, the intentionality it took: letters, phone calls, road trips, taking a limited number of photos and waiting for them to develop, built that connection in a way that a click and a like have trouble replicating.

Which brings me to an obvious argument: it was also before digitization took hold of everything. Yes, computer advancements from the internet to home recording technology may be the “great democratizer,” but they also opened the floodgates of overproduced music, autotune, and the unraveling of print media. Yes, the ability to self-release records is great, but it was also met with the thinning of independent labels, the greater absorption of punk into corporate media and consumption, Ticketmaster now sells basically every ticket, and the wider release of slop. While home recording and self-releasing became easier, they took a different form within DIY culture. While ‘90s bands would often record with friends or put out records themselves, they still relied upon a network and a community. A click and post alone can create output, but risks doing so without community. And of course, punk became much more mainstream. Metrics shifted. It was more about numbers, consumption. Even though the ‘90s lived off 7”s, I think that less had to do with writing a single but more about the desire to record quickly and their accessibility. Streaming, as we all know, moved things away from albums, and heck, maybe even considered EPs, and more toward singles. And the algorithms make and remake that. The music and the environment in which it was created changed.

But maybe that’s all bullshit. I don’t know.

As I said at the top, I’m now often asked why I think there’s such a resurgence of interest in the ‘90s punk scene from people in their early 20s and late teens, specifically the mid-‘90s emo scene my band, Eldritch Anisette, and many others were part of. I don’t know why exactly. I’m still trying to figure it out. It may be as simple as the 30-year cycle phenomenon, the so-called “nostalgia pendulum,” where cultural trends reemerge for the next generation. That’s probably some of it, but I do think it’s something more. I think it’s a combination of having a thriving DIY community and being on the cusp of the internet age. Before the flood of accessibility and algorithms. Where music creation and discovery were a personal journey, and frankly, an effort, in a way, the internet and social media lessen. There was intentionality. On the production end, it was less about pushing content than it was about refining craft. When everything is spoon-fed, I think it’s more alluring to find gems that weren’t fully pushed by an algorithm and, more so, an environment that was tactile. Things were produced with the intention of being held physically. But it is a strange irony. The internet is the reason much of the mid-‘90s music has stayed alive and become discoverable. I mean, heck, I’m on here writing about it all. But I think it’s also a reason why it’s resonated. It’s evidence that another way of expression and connection is possible. That we did all this without any of this. But also, of course, I think it’s just really good music.

Album: Sex, Love and Rock ‘n’ Roll

Artist: Social Distortion

Label: Time Bomb Recordings (2004)

Runtime: 10 songs, ~38 minutes

This band doesn’t need much of an introduction, and this record likely doesn’t either. Eighth entry in and my first one outside the 1990s. (When I started drafting this piece, I went on a long sidetrack about why that may be, but pulled it from here to save for its own dedicated post. Stay tuned for that). So, if I’m gonna do a record from the 2000s, what better way to start than one put out by a band that formed in the…1970s.

Sex, Love and Rock ‘n’ Roll is the sixth studio album by Social Distortion and was released in 2004. The band was a well-known entity by this point, having formed in 1978 out of the Orange County/SoCal hardcore scene of the late ‘70s. Over the next two decades before this record, they took on slightly different variations in sound and lineup and had several hiatuses due to drug rehab stints. But they were a legitimate big punk band nonetheless. Within their first five albums they secured a certified gold record, landed in the Billboard 200, and most people point to one of these first five, rather than this one, as their best. But to me, this is both a perfect punk album, and, their best.

My test for this series is an album that has no skippable song. This isn’t simply an album with no skippable track; it’s an album filled with hit after hit after hit. Each time I listen to this album, I get excited when the next song comes on. I think to myself “oh my gosh this is such a good song” and get kinda sad when it ends only to find that excitement ratchet back up even higher with the opening notes or beats of the next song. In other words, each song is a damn great song. Two or three would make any album and on this one, it has ten of them, one right after each other. They’re also arranged in such a way that they flow organically together. If I drew up a set list for a late summer outdoor festival set list, it would be exactly how these songs are arranged. Perfect. Let’s talk about them.

It has one of the best songs to kick off an album and one of the greatest verses to set an album’s emotional tone with “Reach for the Sky.” The song erupts with a quick squelch of feedback, the brief bursting yelp of a kettle hitting its boiling point and shooting off hot steam. Musically, the song starts with a rising progressional prelude, followed by a rollicking guitar lick, all underwritten by a driving upbeat punk beat. It’s an aggressive melodiousness. It’s riding down the road, 80 miles an hour, with the top down, straight into the sun. Mike Ness, the frontman and creative force behind the band, then sets the tone with the opening verse: “When I was young I was invincible / I find myself now thinking twice / I never thought about no future / It’s just the roll of the dice / But the day may come when you’ve got something to lose / And just when you think you’re done paying dues / And you say to yourself, “Dear God, what have I done?” / And hope it’s not too late ‘cause tomorrow may never come.”

Damn. Talk about a wake up call. Ness throws down the gauntlet. The song, the album, is a reckoning. It comes from someone with well-known and documented struggles over the two decades the band had been together at this point. He’s not shying away from where he’s been, he’s not pulling any punches. He’s looking straight into the mirror and saying it’s time for an intervention, a course correction for a different, better path forward.

The guitars chug, the drums drive, and the vocal melodies are delivered in perfect sing-along fashion, including with background ahhs.

The next track, “Highway 101,” drops in before “Reach for the Sky” fully rings out. A rockin’ drumbeat on kick bass and snare. It’s a beat that could’ve emerged from any great ‘50s or early ‘60s rock ‘n’roll or r&b song and then is met by Ness, squealing feedback and guitar licks. Then the guitars drop in with their head bobbing rhythm, mirroring the drumbeat by playing the chords on the kick and palm mute harmonics on the snare. It exudes a self-sure confidence. It’s a song filled with hope. A song where you’ve seen your share of knockdowns and setbacks but right now, in this moment, everything is right, and the future is filled with promise.

This song, this album, has California written all over it. And as a punk kid born and raised on the East Coast, to me this is my Beach Boys California anthem song and album. Maybe it’s fantasy, but I don’t think so. Each time I’m in California and driving a car (which is every time I’m there), I put this album on and it fits just right. This song most especially.

I can write an ode to each song on this album. They are really that good. The circle pit start of “I Wasn’t Born to Follow.” A song perfect for setting our own path on the side of the underdogs. The laidback strutting vibe of “Footprints on my Ceiling,” which also features a superbly placed Hammond B3 organ at the intro and over the chorus. (The Hammond B3 has unique features that make it similar to a pipe organ rather than a piano or synthesizer. When you press the key of a Hammond the sound of the note releases at a continuous volume until you let go of the key, rather than a piano whose volume gradually decays. It also features vibrato, which wobbles the pitch up and down as the note sustains, and chorus, which blends the note with a detuned twin. It’s a full sound and one that complements the energy and volume of Social D perfectly rather than fighting or taking away from it.) The organ comes back In “Winners and Losers, “Faithless,” and “Angel’s Wings.” I especially love it in “Faithless” where it announces the intro and turnaround as its vibrato and chorus effects give it a ripe fullness that grabs your attention and gives you energy.

And then, there’s “Don’t Take Me for Granted.” To talk about this song, to talk about this album, to talk about this band, in fact, I have to talk about my brother, Matt.

I can’t think of Social Distortion without thinking of my brother, Matt. It’s impossible to do so. I wrote about Matt in a couple previous posts and I’m sure I will again. As I talked about before, our lives were defined by music, as was our life together. He died, unexpectedly, this past March. And he loved Social Distortion. It always surprised me that he did, to be honest. He was generally into heavy stuff. Music with oomph, thick rhythm sections marked by syncopated beats, bluesy bass lines, heavy breakdowns. He especially loved the hardcore end of the spectrum. Bands like Snapcase, Sick of it All, Deftones, Quicksand, Helmet, and some post-hardcore bands like Jawbox. Led Zeppelin and John Bonham’s drumming were the foundation upon which he built his musical life and journey. He was generally dismissive of the more melodic punk that I was into growing up (along with the screamy stuff). Bands like Superchunk, Jawbreaker, certainly the poppier stuff like Screeching Weasel or Propagandhi. And to me, Social Distortion leaned more to this side musically. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling them pop-punk at all, but there is a more straightforward four chord melody to their songs. Most of the songs are upbeat without the moshing, floor punching, breakdown parts. It’s not hardcore. It’s punk rock. But he loved it. And I think a big reason is that there is a bluesy toughness to their music and to this album. And most certainly, to the lyrics themselves. Mike Ness is the quintessential blues-rock ‘n’ roll punk rocker. He’s got the look, the voice, the credibility, and most certainly, the steely resignation of a hard lived life, but one that still grasps onto hope and self-deprecative humor. I think Matt took solace in that. He found affinity in it. I think it spoke to his own pains, his own struggles, and really, his own hopes in a way he just couldn’t locate and express on his own. Matt found himself knocked down often, but he would always manage to pick himself back up and push through even stronger. He would struggle with putting all this into words at times. I think Social Distortion captured it for him in many ways. And quite frankly, it’s just good music. And the optimism within both the harmonic structures and lyrics make the music, well, fun. After he died and I was sorting through his belongings, the only t-shirt of his that I kept for myself was his Social Distortion shirt.

I can’t hear this album without thinking of all the summer nights, arm in arm with Matt, in some field, on some stage, at some festival in Europe, listening to and singing along at the top of our lungs, stupidly drunk and happy, to Social D. In the 2000s, Boysetsfire toured Europe often and was on the festival circuit every summer, sometimes twice a summer. And it seemed, on at least two-thirds of those, there was Social Distortion playing as well. From 2003-on, I was on a number of these, so we got to hear this album performed live nightly a lot.

So, to me, this album is the sound of summer. It’s the sound of hopeful abandon. It’s the sound of getting knocked down but laughing at the situation and yourself, and then picking yourself back up because you know there is more ahead, and one of these days it’s going to be good, real good, damnit. It’s the sound of brotherhood. It’s the sound of family.

And now, this album is the sound of something else for me as well. Something else I’m still trying to make sense of since Matt died.

I’m likely embarrassing myself by this, but I didn’t know the full story behind this album until I started to prepare to write about it for this blog a couple months ago. I always just took it for what it immediately put out, which for me, was enough. But what I learned was that the release of Sex, Love and Rock ‘n’ Roll in 2004 marked eight years since Social D’s previous record. The delay was due to the untimely death of founding member and guitarist, Dennis Danell in February 2000. Danell died in the driveway of his new home while moving in with his wife and two young children. It’s reported he died from a brain aneurysm. He was 38.

The plan had been for Social Distortion to return to the studio at some point in 2001. Their last album came out in ‘96. Ness had taken a brief break, in part, to work on his solo project. But after Danell died, he found it hard to put the pieces of the band back together. Dennis was his lifelong friend who he recruited to join the band. Even teaching him how to play guitar so he could play that instead of bass for Social D. In fact, two of the members at the time quit rather than wait the two years for him to learn how to play. As Mike said at the time of his death, “I am saddened beyond any possible form of expression. Dennis and I have been friends since boyhood, starting Social Distortion while we were in high school.” It left Ness as the sole founding member still in the band. As a result, his death and Ness’s reaction to it, his processing of it, found its way into many of the songs across the album. Four years after his death, and eight years since their last album, this record was released. It’s dedicated to Danell.

It’s a strange experience revisiting this album knowing all this context after my brother died. It’s strange how grief, or to be more precise, death, changes everything. I was talking with some friends about how strange of a thing surviving the death of someone close to you is. Someone that you grew up with, that has been such a key piece of your identity. It’s something that comes for us all yet we rarely talk about. It’s strange how the world keeps moving. It’s strange how we must keep doing all the mundane things: filing our taxes, cutting our grass, buying groceries. It’s strange, especially when the death is sudden, unexpected, how everything was moving forward. The timeline was ticking ahead. And then, all of a sudden, it just stops. Abruptly. That’s it. That’s the end of their story.

Now, I’m sure that isn’t. I know, depending on time, mood, perspective, I can see the ways in which the story continues. The legacy. The impact on others. How that person’s death and their life continue to shape you and others. How there can even be a promise of an afterlife. I know. But what startles me the most is the finality. The period at the end of the sentence. That’s it.

And so with all this, this album hits differently. I can’t help but absorb it through the loss of my brother, and all the memories I have of listening to this album with him, both live and recorded, and think about how it was written in a similar aftermath of sudden loss of someone close and the grief associated with that. The songs, their lyrics and sonic textures, come into a sharper relief. The ache and the longing are carved deeper. And the optimism and hope rise higher.

Because that’s the thing about this record. To me, it captures the essence of Social Distortion at its finest. And what this band is, is both of these. The getting knocked down but knowing, or more accurately still believing, the sun is coming back up tomorrow and we’ll have another chance to get it right, finally, and for once. Maybe this could only emerge from everything that happened. Maybe it was because Ness was venturing into a solo project when suddenly, he was the last original member of his band of (at that time) 22 years. The personal writing he’d gone solo to do ended up coming back into the band. And by then the band was something different. Social Distortion started in 1978 as a group of friends. Now the only one left from that was Mike Ness. The other guys had earned their spots, no question. But they joined a thing he and Dennis had built. I wonder how much this is a lonely position, rather than one of, say, seniority. To be the last standing. Whatever Social Distortion meant, it now meant him. You see this embodied in the album’s cover, Ness’s guitar place on an altar as an offering.

Ness, as Social Distortion, was still writing, still singing, still playing through and despite the hardships. The turns with addiction and rehab. The struggling to make it not just as a band but financially. The departure of bandmates. The death of a childhood friend. Or maybe in all actuality he was doing all this not despite these things but because of all of them. And now, from that, here emerges a perfect record. It reminds me in some ways of many mystical experiences with God and life: the idea that we are made more perfect through our suffering. This allows us, in turn, to more fully experience and embrace the good in life because of the empathy gained from suffering. This is achieved not by repressing them or fighting them, but by facing them head on, just like Ness calls out in his opening verse, and reach for the sky.

And this brings me back to “Don’t Take Me for Granted.” While the whole album has Dennis’s death written across it, this song is the one most identified with him and written most especially for him.

I came across a video of a live performance of the song from over 20 years ago. Ness introduces it and dedicates it to Dennis. He talks about how Danell was a great friend and the moral support of the band that everyone leaned on. “It makes you think that your friends and loved ones are gonna be there forever and then one minute they’re gone forever.” He then introduces the song title and they launch into it. You can watch it yourself here.

Because this is the message within this album. It doesn’t shy away from life’s bruises, its pains, its utter heartbreak. It sees all of it. And it says, yes, all of that is true, and still, things will get better, tomorrow’s sun will be there, life is good, go live it.

The album ends on two songs that embrace this most fully, “Live Before You Die” and “Angel’s Wings.” From the first: “So close your eyes and embrace your memories (your memories) / Leave your troubles and your worries far behind (so far behind) / Stop contemplating, start celebrating / Yeah, you'll live before you die.”

And from the second: “And when you're down on your luck / Hey baby It's a long, long way up / Hold back now, hold back your fears / And when you're really down and out / And you feel like there's no way out now / Let go now, let go of your tears some more.” “Tired of figuring out things on my own / Angel's wings, won't you carry me home.”

Amen.

Album: Monuments to Thieves

Artist: His Hero Is Gone

Label: Prank Records (1997)

Runtime: 15 songs, 25 minutes

My seventh entry into the perfect punk album series, and definitely, the heaviest. After Superchunk and Jawbreaker, I thought it was good to swing in the other direction on the punk spectrum. Enter, His Hero is Gone.

His Hero is Gone had a 7” and a full-length plus some odds and ends by the time Monuments to Thieves was released in 1997. Launched in Late 1994 (according to a rare interview they gave to HeartattaCk, their first show was in November 1994) and breaking up in 1999, His Hero is Gone had already established themselves by this point, so chances are, if you put on this record, you knew what you were getting into. Still, even with this knowledge, it’s hard to be ready for what this album holds. Twenty-nine years on, and I still need to prepare myself when I press play. The album hits you like a sonic force field from the opening track all the way through its final, and 15th. 15 tracks. 25 minutes. It’s a 12” LP but played at 45rpm. It’s like you are being struck by a jet propulsion.

“Like Weeds” opens the album like the steep incline of a roller coaster. The metal screeches and lifts you upwards. Feedback, distortion, and sludge beats move the gears, while the eerily beautiful dueling guitar lines mark the ascent up the track. Almost like a funeral march. Making its way up the hill. Until suddenly, at 51 seconds in, you drop. Paul Burdette fires off a blistering drum fill, throttles into a blast beat mixed with syncopated accents, until 14 seconds later, you hear him do a three-count on his sticks and everything, both guitars and bass, launch in together on a ferocious d-beat. You’re propelled 120 miles per hour down the roller coaster track. Screaming. Smiling. Scared. Exhilarated. Holding on for the ride, and trusting that the orchestrators of this sonic roller coaster know what they’re doing and you’ll make it to the other side in one piece. You do. And before you know it, it’s over, and you’re back in line for more.

The songs across this album each land like this and in their own unique way. With an average length of 1m40s per track, the songs hit hard, hit fast, and hit heavy. They refuse to give you time to get bored, but more than that, the band uses brevity as discipline. They are fast and yet dynamic, with added syncopation and 1/8th time drops. So, while you’ll spend time screaming and finger-pointing along, you’ll then find yourself hurling your body with the breakdowns, your head swinging back and forth to the dirge or sludge beat.

The music is heavy, and while that term gets used a lot in musical criticism and description, this album really earns it. The heaviness is felt. From the D Standard tuning, to the thick distortion of the two guitars, the rumbling undertones of the bass, the kick-heavy d-beats and blast beats, the half-step chordal progressions, and of course the low growling of the vocals led by Todd Burdette (also on guitar) and Carl Augé (also on bass). It’s so uniformly heavy in fact that depending on the stereo and your presets, it can sometimes be hard to discern the timbre of each instrument and the variation within the songs. In my opinion, close surround sound, or live, of course, is best. In other words, the tone is low. But it works. They keep enough dynamism in the tracks and thoughtfulness in the melodic progressions that the whole album doesn’t simply become mud but stays fresh and frankly, interesting. That is a hard balance to maintain with this type of music. Indeed, even with the heaviness and the metal-tinged half-step intervals that give it that menacing trait, there is a clear melody across the songs. Okay, maybe you won’t be whistling them, but surely you’ll be air drumming while humming along.

This low-end, galloping, melodic dynamism that His Hero is Gone brought, and which is on sharp display in Monuments to Thieves, is what I think really sets this band apart from others that came before or who existed at the time. You hear this across many of its tracks, including “Chain of Command,” which plays more at a midtempo, anxious pace, the tension, heightened by the squelching high guitar note, tight across its 3:33 length (the longest track on the album by far, although to be fair, the last 25 seconds or so are a fadeout). Or on “Headless/Heartless,” which shows the melodic metal influence or “Hinges,” which has a hardcore punk d-beat drive.

His Hero is Gone comes from Memphis, Tennessee, a fact that takes shape across Todd’s lyrics. The title and second track of the album “Monument to Thieves” address this head-on, denouncing the statues of Confederate soldiers and the celebration of white lynch mobs. The anti-establishment aesthetic of crust punk takes on even more significance in the American South. While certainly not without meaning in London or the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where it was launched in the UK (with bands like Amebix and Antisect) and the U.S. (with Nausea), the subgenre’s countercultural abrasiveness is even starker in the South, including a blue city like Memphis. You see this in the lyrics to “Like Weeds,” where Todd growls, “Now, there is a war being waged: / It’s our words we must face / As our lives unfold and convictions are old / The real truth is told / And like weeds we will grow.”

But it goes beyond the South to society as a whole. Alienation is a theme across nearly every song. Take, for instance, the shortest track, “Paranoia Secured,” which comes in at a blinking 21 seconds: “Do we feel safe yet? / With house alarms and car alarms / Secured paranoia with killer dogs and firearms / Locks on every door.”

The band avoided most interviews, so the record is relatively thin. But in that HeartattaCk interview I mentioned earlier, they discuss this further. They talk at length about their concerns about an even greater consumer society with the emergence of Internet-based shopping (this is early 1996), and they wouldn’t use computers even to produce their own artwork or lyric sheets (this sentiment takes shape in the lyrics on the album’s track, “Automation”). Todd mentions, passingly, that he made only $3,500 the previous year and lived in his van, but that he and the others were happy and content because they were doing things on their own terms and making their own path.

This album is an album of refusal. Refusal of polish, refusal of length, refusal of melodic accessibility (my previous comments notwithstanding), refusal of status (they gave nearly no interviews), and refusal of societal status quo.

I said from the outset of this blog that I use the term “punk” broadly to encompass all the variations of sound and style in this music. At its heart, it’s always just punk to me. But since I just wrote a piece exploring emo, I can’t talk about His Hero is Gone without saying more about crust punk, at least for the uninitiated.

Crust punk emerged in the mid 1980s in England as a fusion of sounds and politics. It brought punk (the anarcho-punk end) and metal (the extreme metal end, like thrash and doom) together with an explicitly anti-establishment, anarchist politics. Angry, growling, fast with sludge parts, and heavy. The subgenre has Crass and Discharge as its spiritual godparents, from which everything else has flowed. It is not just the sound and politics that define crust punk; they extend to an aesthetic, if not an ethos, and a way of life. Bands were typically named something jarring or caustic-sounding (see the aforementioned bands, as well as Doom, Extreme Noise Terror, Choking Victim, Dissucks, or Das Plague). Nearly every band name is written in illegible lettering, whether spiky metal-influenced font, degraded xerox style, or hand-drawn brush. You could spot (and sorry, yes, sometimes smell) a crust punk a couple of blocks down the road. The uniform of dark and army green colored clothing, often tank tops and long shorts, with more patches than you could recognize. Couple this with dreadlocks and facial piercings, and scruffy facial hair for the guys that somehow, often enough, were never fully grown in.

I never jumped in myself. Maybe in part because I was straight edge at the time (I feel like I never saw a crust punk kid without a 40, even though some were reportedly straight edge), but also because I could never fully commit to such a statement of social rejection. Still, a few friends were crust punks, especially because they were reliably present at protests and politically aware activists within the punk scene. Most of them were anarchists, feminists, vegetarians; they were the most visible punk kids you’d see at protests. And despite the seriousness or anti-social demeanor the aesthetic could give off, I always found most crust punks not to take themselves that seriously (indeed having a silly side) and have a sense of humor.

His Hero is Gone is one of the most well-known and popular crust punk bands. Distinct from the initial waves from the mid-‘80s, and perfecting their own unique sound with the melodic undertones that give shape and texture to their D (or in other albums C#) tuning, distortion, and howls.

Three of the four members carried this sensibility when they went on to form the band Tragedy (you can hear early hints of Tragedy on the track “Chain of Command”). I actually wanted to include Tragedy in this series, but sadly, I don’t think any of their records pass the test (maybe I’ll include them in a future honorable mention). I was lucky enough to play a show with them at ABC No Rio (a perfect setting) and was just awed by the fullness of their guitars. A sound I hunted after (and desperately tried to replicate in Dear Tonight’s song, “Dead Boys”) but without success.

But before Tragedy, I got to see His Hero is Gone live several times. I remember seeing them at the DIY-punk warehouse space, Stalag 13 in Philadelphia (again, a classic setting for such a band), among other venues. My most memorable is when I saw them in Chicago at the Fireside Bowl in the summer of 1997. They played with Los Crudos, a legendary hardcore band of all-Latino guys based in Chicago and fronted by an out queer singer who screamed entirely in Spanish. As a result, I’ve always associated the two bands together. If I remember correctly, it was a matinee. I was on a cross-country road trip with three friends, Meatball Matt, Casey, and Donna. Ostensibly, we were driving Casey to college out in California. More so, we were taking a few weeks before our senior year in high school to track across the country and back, sleeping on floors and couches of pen pals we made through the mid-90s DIY punk scene.

This was one of the beautiful things about the scene at the time. We developed such close relationships with people that we would meet at a festival somewhere, or maybe they put out a zine you read, or played in a band you put on a show for, or the opposite way around, and we’d just write each other. I remember the letters would vary in length. Sometimes just quick matter-of-fact updates, but often more than that, little tidbits of our lives, music we were listening to, or often sharing poetry, writing, art, craft, mixtapes, or more. And always with that “p.s., reuse the stamp.” (There used to be a thing that if you rubbed a thin layer of Elmer’s glue over the stamp before you mailed it, then when the other person got your letter, they could wash off the postal stamp ink and cut out and reuse the stamp. It actually worked).

We tapped into it for this trip, staying on friends’ couches in Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, Little Rock, Plano, and more. We camped out one night off some random road north of Denver. We lived off peanut butter sandwiches.

This was pre-Google Maps, pre-MapQuest, and even pre-commercial GPS days. I remember going to AAA and meeting with someone who helped us highlight a route on our giant road atlas. It was an adventure.

So in Chicago we stayed for a couple of nights with my friend Laurent, whom I met through my old girl/friend Cristina, and on the floor of one of the Braid guy’s apartments (can’t remember if it was Chris or Bob - we had set up several shows for them in Delaware by this point). I remember one night, sitting on an El train overpass with Laurent. Taking in all the sounds. We were both straight edge at this point, so no Mad Dog 20/20 this time (see my previous Jawbreaker post), but instead long conversations with the rumbling trains underneath us. Talking about politics, music, Faith, the future, and moving past my teenage crush.

The next day we went to this show. I think it may have been the only show we saw on the whole trip. We had timed our Chicago stay for this show (we stayed there a few nights, which was the longest we stayed anywhere on that trip), and it did not disappoint. His Hero Is Gone was touring in support of this album. For whatever reason, maybe because it was a matinee, the show wasn’t packed. It’s a shame because it was one of the best and most fun shows I’ve ever been to. First, being at this legendary punk venue, which was also a bowling alley. Second, getting to see Los Crudos live in their hometown (I still have their shirt and record I bought there). They were amazing. Martin is such a great frontman. And third, His Hero is Gone playing much of this album. I had their 7” and first LP at this point, but this was the first time I was hearing this new stuff, and it just blew me away. I thought I knew hardcore before, but their set brought it to a different level.

The magic of the DIY punk community, I think, is what, in large part, makes this show so memorable. Here we were. Seeing a band from Memphis that gave almost no interviews, wouldn’t touch a computer, did everything on their own terms, and made a 15-song record that lasts twenty-five minutes. And nonetheless, it still reached four kids on the road from Delaware in a bowling alley in Chicago. It came through word of mouth show advertising, sleeping on a friend’s floor, a stamp someone washed and reused, shows and zines we put on and out ourselves, and a route highlighted by hand at an AAA desk. They refused every mainstream channel that was supposed to carry music to people. It reached us anyway, because the community was the channel.

We got the record and quickly dubbed it to cassette so we could listen to it in the car (which only had a cassette deck!). We played it on repeat as we headed out of Chicago, energizing us across the long, flat, and empty roads awaiting us further west.

Not as a description, and not aimed at me, which it was back in the day, typically by people who meant it as a slight. This happened sometimes at shows when we would talk before or after a song or collapse from playing, or simply how we showed up.

And now, thirty years on, here we are. Numero Group (we love you!) reissued Eldritch Anisette’s music and the word is right there in how they describe it. We played California in June and people were coming up to us talking about second wave emo, meaning us. It’s in the posts, it’s in the comments, it’s in the way people find the band now. In fact, someone told JD that we are both second wave emo and fifth wave emo which is second wave emo renaissance. Or something like that. It wasn’t just Eldritch Anisette. Network 34 was labeled screamo. A lot of other bands growing up were too. I remember Boysetsfire when they first launched were named emo too.

I spent a long time refusing the label, but I think it just waited me out.

So I want to work out what the word, for me, actually names. Not what it got used for. What it names.

The clearest version of it I have found is not a punk record.

It took place on a train.

This was early during my jazz deep dive, the one I started in 2023 and still haven’t come out of. Morning commute, headphones on, eyes closed. A Love Supreme by John Coltrane and his classic quartet playing. I wasn’t listening with any intent. It was simply on. I hadn’t read the Coltrane books yet. I hadn’t yet taken the class on Elvin Jones’s drumming. I had read a memoir of Ahmed Abdullah, who played with Sun Ra, and the big Robin D.G. Kelley biography on Thelonious Monk. I had taken classes on Mingus (taught by his son, Eric) and on South African jazz and more, but I hadn’t yet plunged into Coltrane. In part, maybe I knew I was making my way there, that it was a summit I had to make my way to, and wanted to do so carefully and with some sense of direction first. I had not even read the liner notes of the record. Honestly. It was just on.

I was going about my commute, in that half morning fog when “Psalm” came on. The fourth and last track of A Love Supreme.

At the risk of sounding absurd (I may have jumped the shark on that already in this blog, I’m afraid), I’m going to describe it how I felt it.

What struck me initially was the emotion. It swelled from inside me. It wasn’t just within my ears, or my head. It came up from my chest and outside of me. I felt a radiant light around me. The music was a yearning and an imploring praise. It was a call. And it was also its response. Warm and assuring. Dimly aware that I was in a public space, I felt in the depth of me that this was mystical music. It is searching a connection with the oneness of God. You could hear Coltrane pulling from within himself and searching it out in breathy riffs and melodies rising with an emotion that was deep. The notes on his saxophone searching a certain point, faltering at times from fragility, and other times resounding with assurance.

Underneath him, Jones, Garrison, and Tyner built a kind of sonic embrace around the horn. Not just an environment. A support structure, with texture, rolling calls that push away clouds. A cleansing, making room for the offering. The rolling sound of Jones’ mallets on his timpani, Tyner playing arpeggios and chords as raindrops falling, Garrison’s bass as the raindrops falling into puddles. But each of them together creating a break, the eye in the middle of a storm, where the sun emerges behind the clouds to send warmth and light on an earth alive with life.

I was on a train full of midtown commuters. I opened my eyes, still in this state for a few seconds. I saw everyone else on my train car, and felt a closeness. And then, rather abruptly, I realized I had gone somewhere else. That another part of me was tapped into. I felt embarrassed and a bit silly. I am sure no one around me noticed anything, and thankfully in this case everyone else is always in their own world (and yet we always think we’re the center of everyone else’s), but it felt like a sense of vulnerability. Exposure. I became self-aware and realized what was happening, and took a breath.

I remember I quickly texted my friend chat group: Coltrane is emo music. I got some laughs in response. But I meant it. Never mind Sunny Day Real Estate, Indian Summer, Still Life, Rites of Spring, The Promise Ring, Embrace, Mineral, etc. The crown jewel of emo is John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

So what do I mean by emo? Because by the definition most people use, what I just said probably sounds like nonsense. And to some extent I am taking liberties and yes, having some fun, but hear me out.

Most definitions are about subject matter. Feelings, diaries, relationships, the specific pain of being nineteen. Or they’re about orchestration. Loud parts and quiet parts, a certain guitar tone, a voice that cracks on purpose, the scream in the bridge. Sometimes, emo is defined more about fashion aesthetic: stark eyeliner, swooping plastered hair styles usually jet black, accessories, tight clothing, painted fingernails. Derisively it means someone weak, too sensitive, overly wrought, and self-obsessed. By any of these, a 1964 jazz suite by a 38-year-old man on saxophone about his relationship with God is not in the conversation.

To me, though, 30 years after the label got thrown at me, I’ve understood that’s not really what emo is.

It may be my bias as a musician, but for me, when I think about emo, what I care about is the way instruments, including voice, get used and songs get built to carry something. How the people playing them are using them almost like divining rods. Where the playing and the writing are doing the work of communicating deep emotion. Where vulnerability is presented as strength. Where the point is authentic self-realization. Not for mere performance or attention but an inner searching. Getting to something true in yourself. And then, releasing it, exposed, until it reaches whoever is listening and the emotion turns into a shared thing. And then, while it’s being played, it belongs to everybody in the room, players and listeners both, at that moment.

Which, actually, is a definition I already wrote down a few posts back, but just didn’t call it emo at the time.

Over a month ago I published a piece about my brother Matt, who died in March, and about the song I wrote after my parents called to say he’d been moved to the ICU, and then what happened when Eldritch Anisette played it at our reunion shows. What I said on that stage, before I fell apart trying to play it, was that music is a vessel. Something that can hold your emotions, that you express into and then hand to other people. That it isn’t only self-expression, it’s collective experience. That it holds whatever you put in it and that the music changes shape as other people touch it.

That’s it.

But there’s an obvious objection to that definition. If emo is just music that carries deep feeling and hands it to a room, then nearly everything is emo. Adele is emo. Celine Dion is emo. At this point, the word stops meaning anything.

So, I’ll narrow it, and do so by going back to when it was bandied about in the mid-90s.

Emo isn’t only feeling but feeling showing up in music where the scene resisted it. The feeling in music has to cost something. It has to break a rule that the scene around it is enforcing. That’s why the hardcore kids I came up around used the word as a put down, or as dismissal, and not simply a genre tag. I remember when Eldritch played a show with Deadguy and Damnation where the crowd (not the bands, they were great) wanted it tougher, and some heckled, “stop being so emo.” Of course, a large part of this was that a woman was on the microphone, telling these guys things they didn’t want to hear. Or when Boysetsfire played Columbus Fest and similar barbs were tossed at them when they talked about songs that dealt with abuse and trauma rather than just playing. Or simply when anyone showed feeling and had to quickly follow it up with “sorry, I’m being so emo.” People apologizing in advance for their own emotions. That apology is at the heart of it, a scene that trained people to apologize for feeling. You had a scene built on toughness and armor and aggression, and then somebody stands up in the middle of it and is feeling out loud. This time without apologizing. That’s it. Not the sadness or whatever it may be, but the authenticity of being human when authenticity wasn’t allowed.

Which is exactly why most emotional music doesn’t qualify, and why this record does. Pop has always let you feel big, so there is nothing transgressive about a ballad or a torch song. But Coltrane made naked spiritual devotion at a moment when that was not the register jazz was reaching for. Unguarded devotion was not the dominant pose; the prestige was in complexity (e.g., bebop), or detachment (e.g., cool jazz), not in someone laying themself bare. He was too much for his context in the same way a band with a girl singer and excavated feelings was too much for a hardcore show in 1996 or for Rites of Spring in the middle of the ‘80’s Revolution Summer. It’s the emotion arriving where it wasn’t welcome.

Now, the other obvious objection. There are no guitars on this record. Certainly no distorted guitars. And for the most part, no vocals, let alone screaming! “It’s jazz!”

Never mind all that. Honestly, I think the Quartet could do it with whatever instruments they were handed.

Coltrane’s sax carries the drive and power, and it’s the one that screams and sings. And it presents the dynamics too, as there’s a tenderness in it too, found in whispers, like a low song sung to yourself when you’re alone and your voice is all you can hear. Put headphones on (please listen to it with headphones on) and you can hear his slight over-breath on the lower register, which is to say you can hear his being in the room. It’s not overly produced. You can tell there’s a living, breathing person behind all of this. Meanwhile, the rest of the Quartet do their parts as well. Tyner’s keys give the pieces a melodic and syncopated voicing that keeps everything alive and fresh. Garrison’s bass runs rhythmic melodies, including the famous, hypnotic ostinato lines, underneath it. And Elvin Jones is pure fireworks. He pulls in styles from across the African diaspora and makes them his own, riding soft and behind the beat one moment and driving the next. Musical percussion. He would be a perfect fit for any screamo band.

Put Jones and Garrison together and you get a rhythm section that flows and bends. With enough practice, a trained musician can play to a click. And well, of course a computer can too. What may seem like an imperfection in tempo is actually the song’s respiration. The breath in the rhythm and melody including the accidental rim shots or Coltrane’s over-breath can’t be faked. It is evidence of a living, feeling body doing this. It’s the same reason a technically flawed take can beat a clean one. Across all the performances, there is authenticity at the level of tempo and tone.

As it turns out, Coltrane’s horn playing on “Psalm,” the track that hit me on the train, is his delivery of the poem he included on the inner sleeve. The emotionality and intention in A Love Supreme is not just in the sound. Coltrane wanted to make it explicit by expressing it in words as well. His writing accompanying the album, reminds me of many “emo” record inserts, or even more, the zines that emerged around the same time in the mid-90s, featuring poetry, short stories, and visual art as another layer to the music being made. Meanwhile, Coltrane took his poem and recited it through his saxophone.

And it isn’t only “Psalm.” It’s the whole record. Each track taps into a deep emotionality, captures it, releases it, and hands it off. The album is a suite, so it was built that way on purpose. My test for the “perfect punk album” posts has always been whether there’s a skippable song, and a suite is the extreme case of passing it. There’s the mantra bass of “Acknowledgement,” the surge of “Resolution,” the sprint of “Pursuance,” and the ode of “Psalm.”

Oh, and by the way, there are vocals, as it happens. A rarity for Coltrane. The famous chant, “a love supreme,” sung over and over on the opening track, “Acknowledgement.” It’s Coltrane himself chanting it, 19 times, overdubbed by himself. Meanwhile, he copies the line on sax, playing it across all 12 keys.

The two of these, the chanted mantra in “Acknowledgement” to the sax poem in “Psalm,” give the record a unique shape I only noticed some time later. It opens with a voice chanting words out loud and closes with a horn reciting words left unspoken.

There is such a journey of emotive energy across the four parts of A Love Supreme. Meditative to restrained to frantic overloading and finally to “Psalm.” And I want to close with the piece, “Psalm,” that I started with in this post. The way the saxophone moves from an inviting call to begin the song to an urgent cathartic release to close it out. The way Jones creates an atmospheric structure of thundering storm clouds on timpani and cymbals, using mallets. It has to go last and close out the suite. I get it.

Eldritch Anisette has a song called “Dissection of Silence.” We have to play it last. Not for pacing, not because it’s the big one, necessarily. But because it rips everything out of us and there’s nothing you can put after it. 30 years ago, we would end up spent, half of us on the ground, half of us in tears. Each time changing which half was which, sometimes it was all of us doing all of it. We weren’t sure exactly how it would be when we played it again, at practice and at our reunion show some 30 years later, but we tried to anticipate whatever would come. It had the same effect. There remains a place we each go to, forever present but not forever tapped, deep within ourselves. We find it, and we pull it out. Or rather, the song, the music, the lyrics, pull it out of us. While each of our songs hit us in their own way, that is just it, they each have their own way. And this one is visceral. The four of us finding a place together through sound.

Thirty years ago I wouldn’t call all this emo. I resisted the label. But, it turns out the thing it names is a man in a studio in December 1964, with three of the best musicians alive alongside him, reaching so deep inside that he reaches everywhere, in order to play a poem to God on a saxophone. Fine. Call it emo. I’ll take it.

As always, thank you for reading.

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Perfect Punk Album Series (listed in order of appearance)

1. Welcome to Lancaster County

   (Music is a Time Machine)

2. The Pink Album / LP2

   (Some bands are supernova)

3. Rainbows From Atoms

   (Music as dissolution of self)

4. No Pocky for Kitty

   (Music that needs no trick)

5. 24 Hour Revenge Therapy

   (Music as soundtrack to heartbreak)

6. 5 Honorable Mentions

   (The bird sings with its fingers)

7. Monuments to Thieves

   (Music as Refusal)

8. Sex, Love and Rock ‘n’ Roll

   (Music as a Way Through Grief)

9. Civil War

   (Music is the Story)

Punk and Jazz: Exploring Resonance (listed in order of appearance)

1. Out of Step Ascension: Beginning to connect punk and jazz

   (Music as Transgression)

2. “A Love Supreme” is an Emo Record

Music, Me, and Beyond (listed in order of appearance)

1. For Want Of…

   (A Welcome Post)

2. I Didn’t Realize There Was a Place That Deep

   (Music as Vessel)

3. Music Is Community: The first Delaware Music History Archive Expo

   (Music is community, music is us)

4. Why the ‘90s?

   (Music as an Enduring Moment)

Thank you, as always, and happy trails!

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Well, I’m just about two months into this music blog. I started it to scratch the itch of all these thoughts in my head, was encouraged by my friends who wanted me to stop bugging them in group chats and just write it already, and am now driven by the emerging discipline and practice of regular writing.

Thank you for coming along for the ride. It has been an unexpected joy to get responses from so many people, both old friends and people I’ve never met before. It’s the magic of music and reminds me of the old days of pen pal writing and zine exchanges in the ‘90s DIY punk scene I grew up in.

In For Want Of… I set out to write a few different things: perfect punk albums, explore connections between jazz and punk, and share a bit of my own philosophy and personal memoir with music.

I’m now five albums in on the perfect punk series, and it feels like a good place to pause and tip my hat to five albums that I really, really wanted to include in the series, but that just don’t quite pass the test.

As I said at the start of the series, the test is simple but hard. First, it has to be an actual album. Not an EP (so many great 7”s and 10”s), and not a comp lp (sorry, Fugazi’s 13 Songs). Second, it must have no skippable track. The second threshold is pretty subjective, and I’m surprised I haven’t gotten pushback yet, but maybe that’s what this post will provoke.

There are albums I love, records I fully intended to write about in this series, that when I revisited them to prepare for this series, I had to begrudingly admit that they don’t pass. It pains me. Albums where I already envisioned the narrative arc they could offer, the musical craft they exhibit, the place they hold, but then something would get in the way. They’re all great albums. Some of them are among my favorites. But each has a track or two or three that sink it.

But…because I love them anyway, and because they’re so close, I decided to use this post to give five quick shoutouts. It also affords me the opportunity to highlight some great albums that just miss the mark, which hopefully gives some honesty about my test.

As a quick reminder, here are the five that have made it so far:

• Spirit Assembly’s Welcome to Lancaster County

• Sunny Day Real Estate’s LP2 / The Pink Album

• Lungfish’s Rainbows From Atoms

• Superchunk’s No Pocky for Kitty

• Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy

And now, for five that didn’t.

1. Seaweed - Spanaway (1995, Hollywood Records)

This is, by far, my favorite Seaweed album, and it has some of my favorite songs ever. “Magic Mountainman” is a top-three all-time song for me. I stand by that. “Crush Us All” is right up there, too.

Those first six tracks are, simply put, banger after banger. So. Damn. Good.

Which is exactly what makes this one so hard, and exactly why it’s proof the test is real. “Assistant (To The Manager),” “Last Humans,” and “Peppy’s Bingo” tank it.

It’s such a good record, with some of my favorite songs ever. And I just can’t put it up here because of those three. That’s the test keeping me honest. But I have a feeling Seaweed may end up on the main page sooner or later anyway.

2. Mineral - The Power of Failing (1997, Crank!)

Mineral is canon. Heartfelt, rending vocals, music built to break you open. If you’re drawing up the emo canon, this record is on it, no argument.

In my junior year of high school, our English teacher had us bring in a song to play for the class as a way to talk about poetic devices (clutch your pearls, poets). As a 16-17-year-old, I agonized over it. I was one of just a couple of kids at my school who were into independent punk music at this point. Everyone knew that I was into music and played music, but they didn’t really understand what it was. So, to me, it felt like this was my chance at both revelation and evangelization. I finally landed on Mineral, and on their track, “If I Could,” off The Power of Failing. I had to ask my teacher to bring in a turntable because I was the only kid in the room who wasn’t handing over a CD, which felt like something in itself.

Later that year, I saw Mineral live in Philadelphia. I was so excited. Here was this band that was chef’s kiss emo. It was gonna be an experience. Instead, it was so boring. They just stood there. I remember thinking, “How do you make music this wrenching and then be this inert in a room?”

And that bleeds into the record. “Dolorosa” and “Silver” do the same thing. They drag, and they drag to the point where the emotional investment you’ve made turns on you and leaves a bad taste. This isn’t a case of keeping it simple or a droning trance. Rather than pulling you in, these two tracks just push you out.

Skip.

3. Team Dresch - Personal Best (1995, Chainsaw Records / Candy-Ass Records)

I loved this band. Thoughtful, funny, angry, loving sing-along lyrics. Complicated song structures that still cohere into a solid, catchy piece. Real range and diversity in the songs all across the record. It’s such an awesome record. Never mind Personal Best, this record is one of the best (ha, see what I did there?).

Plus, Team Dresch is a queer women band, which was pretty (and sadly) unprecedented at the time (one thing I’ve loved with the scene nowadays is how much more present this is!). Even though the punk scene was relatively welcoming and inclusive, it still had its guarded gates. Which bands were given the most access were still very male, still very hetero male, still very cisgendered hetero male. Team Dresch was (and is) subversive not just more generally in society but within our scene, too. The personal was very much political. And it was hard for them to get the recognition they so well-deserved. In addition to the DIY drive and culture, there is a reason this title is self-released on their own labels. At the time, within my scene, it became a marker of who was in, the ones who were family, who were allies if not queer too, by whether songs from this record showed up on their mixtapes or if they were fans.

Before I started this blog, I was sure this album would be included in my perfect punk album series. But I just can’t do it.

I was talking to a friend about this one, and before I could say which song, she already agreed and was sure it’d be “Freewheel” that undoes it. But, for me, that’s not the one. In fact, I think that song is solid within the album and is a prelude to the folk-punk wave thing that turns up in bands like Against Me! a decade and change later.

It’s “She’s Amazing.” The song drags. Same issue as with Mineral. It just sits there, and doesn’t move or pull you in.

4. Avail - Over the James (1998, Lookout! Records)

Avail is a legend, at least in our Delmarva nook.

I first heard them early in middle school. My friend John, who played in that first band with me, handed me a cassette of Satiate (their first album, released in 1992) on a class trip to Colonial Williamsburg. I kinda remember he said he got it from a skater friend. I think I had just turned 13, and this was one of the first punk records I ever listened to. I remember I was listening to “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix when he handed it to me. And I just played it over and over again.

Avail runs deep in that Delaware crew and beyond. Richmond wasn’t too far away to drive to, and Avail would play our area a lot. And this album is just so good.

I remember one night on one of Boy Sets Fire’s European tours, listening to Over the James, all of us in a drunken delight, singing along and throwing our bodies over the seats. “Stagediving” inside the bus. I remember my brother Matt being in such a great mood, really happy, and just singing along to every word. That was a great night.

I remember another tour, this time in a van with Dear Tonight, and our drummer, Dan, singing along to “Fifth Wheel” at the top of his lungs like he was trying to expel them out of his mouth or pop a blood vessel trying.

I can’t believe a band can write so many anthemic songs, but that’s just simply the Avail formula.

When they played a reunion in Brooklyn in 2019, our Delaware-in-Brooklyn crew turned out and had a blast. Everyone at that show did. I lost myself in the joy of it. I hadn’t gone to a punk show in years, and it just brought me back to what I loved, the pure collective catharsis you can experience dancing in the pit, no distractions, everyone present together.

That one was nostalgia. In my post last week about Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, I wrote about how that reunion show, for me at least, wasn’t about nostalgia, and I meant it. But sometimes these reunion shows are. And you know, what? So what. Sometimes it’s great to just be a kid again for a night.

This album is so good. Fourteen tracks, but sadly, “Vine” and “Ask” make it fail the test. If only they made it a 12-song record, it’d be sitting in the main series instead of the honorable mentions.

5. Neurosis - Times of Grace (1999, Relapse Records)

Oh my goodness, this album. There’s so much here. This is one of the first experiences I had experiencing the cathartic, near-ecstatic thing a heavy ass record like this can do, and this is one of the best to do it. The first four songs kick off and simply take you over. It’s a heavy trance.

I got to see them live at Tramps (RIP) in New York City on this tour. It was my second year in New York City, and my life there still felt fresh and like a discovery. I’d spend parts of my late mornings and afternoons in class and then my nights skateboarding the empty streets of Manhattan, cutting across Times Square, Chelsea, the Village, at 1:00 a.m. with my roommate, Danny. Somehow, we’d often end up with a 40 and falafel from Mamoun’s. This was still Giuliani’s New York. There was a sense of freedom and danger in Manhattan at that time. I don’t think it was just because I was 18 and 19, but I think it’s what it actually was, and it’s something that NYC has long lost. Though I know everyone says that about the old days.

Tramps is gone too, another venue lost to the tides of New York real estate. The Neurosis show was in the venue’s final year.

The show was unlike anything I’d experienced. Bodies moving as one, a constant wave rolling back and forth across the room. The music full, almost to the point where it wasn’t invisible sound but some tangible force that surrounded us and moved us back and forth in time. It was this album they played live.

And if this album on its own wasn’t enough, then there’s Times of Grace coupled with Tribes of Neurot’s Grace. Tribes of Neurot was Neurosis’s “dark ambient” side project, and this release was a companion record to Times of Grace, with the two meant to be played over one another. Try lining those two up exactly, though! Not sure if I ever succeeded.

So, I was so ready to write about this record. All the feeling. All the cathartic and ecstatic power of music. My early days in New York City. I was even prepared to defend “Belief” and “Exist,” the moodier, slower, more atmospheric pieces, because I think they actually work within the album’s narrative. Then there’s “End of the Harvest,” one of my favorite songs ever written. I’ve always wanted to write a song as heavy and as compelling as that, and I’ve always failed.

But “Descent” kills it and makes it fail the test. Sorry. That bagpipe drone is too much. Make it stop. Please! There were plenty of other drones they could have reached for, a shruti box, a tanpura, a synth. Any of them would have worked. Just not that damn bagpipe.

So, these are five honorable mentions. Exclusions that hopefully prove the rule. And, affording me some wiggle room to give a quick nod in their direction. I know one could just say, “Forget about the rule. Change it! Rules are made to be broken! This is punk rock!” But the discipline of holding this test drives the focus. A test that never excludes anything valuable isn’t a test. The fact that it costs me records I love, hopefully, is evidence that it means something.

Stay tuned for future posts! I have more perfect punk albums to write about, more connections between jazz and punk to explore, and hopefully some interviews to share as well!

And please let me know what you think, and feel free to share. Thanks!

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Album: 24 Hour Revenge Therapy

Artist: Jawbreaker

Label: Tupelo Recording Company and Communion Label (1994)

Runtime: 11 songs, ~37 minutes

Everyone knows this band and this record. Its inclusion in my “perfect punk album” series (defined as no skippable track) surprises no one. Sure, there are some who would argue Dear You. But that’s not the one. It’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy.

I, like nearly everyone I know, has a relationship with this band, and especially with this record. For most, it’s almost as though it was written for them. Their own personal soundtrack to a moment in their adolescence. And 99 out of 100 of those moments have to deal with a heartache, a longing, some early romance. I’ve got two friends with their own version of the same story, at the same time of life (I’ll get to them). 24 Hour Revenge Therapy is the soundtrack to teenage love. And it includes my own.

Whether or not it’s Jawbreaker and 24 Hour, for everyone there is not just a track but usually a band and an album that marks that time when they discovered what it means to fall for someone. What it means to break that person’s heart or more likely have their own broken. What it means to want someone and to have that want left unfulfilled. And for me, and many others, it’s this one.

There’s a 33⅓ series book about this record. I was thrilled when I found it some years ago. I remember reading it whenever I had the chance, on the subway, at home. But it ended up just making me annoyed. I think it’s awful to be direct. Not because it’s badly written per se but because it misses the entire point. I went in reading a book about a record so closely tied to love’s tribulations but it was all mechanics. The sessions, the gear, the decisions that got made in the room. Scene politics, the pre-major label posturing. It describes the machine but lacks its soul. What really makes 24 Hour Revenge Therapy’s lasting impact.

So go read that book for how it was made. I’m going in a different direction here. This one is about what it did. It’s a bit different than my previous perfect punk album posts. It’s presented as soundtrack. Told across most of the album’s songs. And for me, like many others, it was about a girl.

Boxcar

(“One, two, three, four / Who’s punk? What’s the score?”)

But before the girl, there was middle school. It was near the end of the 8th grade, when the first band I was ever in decided to enter our school’s talent show. I was recently 14 and had been playing guitar for over a year, and started this first band, with my friends, John, Matt, and Dan at some point in the spring of 1994. We practiced in John’s basement. I remember being there, practicing, when MTV broke the news that Kurt Cobain committed suicide. We were stunned and did the only thing we could do, we played more music. We mostly did covers. “Boxcar” was one of them. 24 Hour just came out and I was obsessed. I already knew Jawbreaker from Bivouac (again, via my older sister, and, by the way, “Chesterfield King” remains my favorite Jawbreaker song to this day, with “Kiss the Bottle” close behind) and then found Unfun later. I figured out how to play “Boxcar” on guitar at 14, because that’s the kind of song it is. Simple. The verse is essentially just G and C bouncing back and forth (some added chords for turnarounds). The chorus with only a slight variations to A and Em. All power chords. The simplicity isn’t a shortcoming, it’s the entire magic of the song. We decided we’d play it for the talent show.

We had to submit the lyrics ahead of time for approval, which, given what that song says, should have been a problem at 14. I remember being asked to explain them. I don’t know what I said but I gave some explanation about poetic license. Ms. Beck, the cool art teacher who I remember always being dressed in a horizontally striped black and white shirt, ran the talent show and she let it through, smiling.

The talent show was in the auditorium. After the dance routines, gymnastics, and magic shows, we played last. I was on guitar and vocals. And the kids went wild. With the chairs bolted down, I remember a dozen or so kids jumping and running up from their seats and finding some space to slam dance in the auditorium. At the end of the day, it was announced over the loudspeaker that we won.

There’s a VHS of it somewhere.

Three months later, I was entering high school.

West Bay Invitational

(“We’re having a party / Please come / It won’t be the same without you / Please come”)

I was deep into Jawbreaker by then. On all my school books and notebooks, or anywhere really, I would draw the Jawbreaker four Fs logo. I even carved it into my bedroom wall with a pocket knife, much to my parents’ dismay. And I got a great Jawbreaker t-shirt, at one of our local independent record stores, Wonderland.

She talked to me because of that shirt.

First day of high school, I was wearing my Jawbreaker t-shirt, and a senior stopped me about it. Her name was Cristina. I was a freshman. She smiled at me, with chin length jet black hair, and told me “cool shirt.”

I crushed fast and I crushed hard.

She was into some punk (the more pop end of it), writing and literature, and had a sense of humor. She was also in a relationship at the time and I knew it. Of course, as we weren’t in the same grade we had no classes together. So what we had were hallway encounters that weighed enormously on me. That flutter in the chest, and trying to be cool at the same time. We rode the same bus and even though she didn’t need to, she’d often ride it home, and sit next to me and we’d talk music and writing, and our random thoughts. We talked about our favorite bands, and favorite authors. She told someone I was the Jawbreaker boy with nice hair. My hair was long then. I held onto that sentence for years.

That impression went beyond Cristina as well. At some point near the end of my freshman year, I formed Network 34 with my friends Tim on drums and vocals, and Jeff on bass. We played loud, chaotic, start/stop, screamy music. After our first show people were stoked and telling us how into it they were. Several of them said the same thing in surprise: they thought we were gonna sound like Jawbreaker.

Cristina and I had a running joke. We’d pass each other in the hall and one of us would say, hey, did you hear Jawbreaker broke up? That was the whole joke. We did it for a long time.

I don’t understand now why it landed or why it lasted. Maybe because we both felt how much that band mattered to each of us, and to whatever was taking shape between us.

Condition Oakland

(“I rode down to the tracks / Thinking they might sing to me / But they just stared back”)

When I was small, living in New Jersey, I could hear a train whistle outside my window as I fell asleep. It was a comforting sound. The rumbling, the whistling. The sound of people and things in motion. And yet, a steady presence. It would help me clear my mind and ease to sleep.

I have always been drawn to trains.

Trains ran through Newark, Delaware too, where I lived as a teenager. We all used to spend time on their tracks. So much so that on two separate nights, two different people I knew got hit by trains coming down those tracks, losing limbs but fortunately surviving,

At 14 I’d go up on the rail overpass cutting across downtown Newark with a bottle of red Mad Dog 20/20 that I’d get from an older punk kid in the scene, or by asking someone outside the liquor store. Sometimes with a pack of Camel Lights (was this a common Gen X thing to do at so young of an age?). I’d go with friends or sometimes just sit by myself. I loved to climb up there, the feeling of gravel under my feet, the wind cutting through more clearly, and find a place to sit, there above the road and cars, where things felt a layer removed. Listening to the evening fall into night, the heat leave the streets, and the sounds shift while listening and feeling for the rumbling coming down the tracks.

I looked down those long rails, thinking of them static yet propelling things back and forth, and look for answers. About school, about growing up, about Cristina. Everything I was feeling about her had gathered into a knot I couldn’t undo, and I remember thinking that up there, somehow, it would come clear.

It didn’t.

(“Read and I felt so small / Some words keep speaking when you close the book”)

Instead, I turned to writing. In fact, those first years of high school, I fell deep into writing. I’d always done handwritten short stories and comics as a kid, but this was when I found out there was a thing called literature and poetry. I started where any punk boy starts. The Beats, Bukowski, Vonnegut, Neruda. Often reading them up on those train tracks.

I was trying to make sense of what was happening to me by writing it down and reading what others wrote. I couldn’t really say it out loud yet. But writing and reading felt like tapping into something. Like I could see it better, and hold it, and with any luck let it go.

Mostly I failed. I did enter a short playwriting competition on a whim, and won it. But mostly, I filled notebooks failing.

And then here was this record. Made by a guy who studied English literature and creative writing at NYU, where the band formed (a fact that definitely weighed on my decision to go there too), who had already found the sentences. Not sentences about a feeling like mine. Sentences for it exactly.

I, like many people, was pulled in by the way Blake crafted his lyrics, his wordplay, his imagery, his sense of irony that could switch between playfulness and resignation. This is on display all across 24 Hour. And what’s more, it’s delivered in his singular voice, filled with emotion and stretched to its limit. It’s not exaggeration to call Jawbreaker punk rock literature. His lines weren’t just lyrics, but a language I didn’t have yet.

In Sadding Around

(“When I throw myself at your feet / You know it’s to be walked on”)

Then she found out I wrote, and it became something else.

We wrote short stories back and forth. Shared our poetry. We’d talk about our favorite authors. I talked about Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” and she gave me a copy of Barthes’ “A Lover’s Discourse.” When she found out I was reading Bukowski, she gave me a copy of “Post Office.”

We also made mixtapes for each other. That was my first real signal, a hope that seemed to be more than just mere coincidence, that perhaps she liked me too. Mixtapes carried their own secret meta-language at the time. We pretended they didn’t mean anything but mixtapes were coded love letters. They weren’t just a way to transmit our favorite bands or songs, but messages we hoped the other would decipher and dare to believe. I still remember she kicked the mixtape off with “Dare” by the Wedding Present, followed by Superchunk’s “On the Mouth” (song not album), and then “Want,” off Jawbreaker’s first album. A solid first three, and surely, I told myself, expressing more than simply that.

We talked about writing to each other using nothing but Jawbreaker lyrics. We never quite did it. What happened instead was that their lines kept turning up in the notes and the stories anyway, because they were already the words we had, and an inside reference between us.

Near the end of that school year she proposed that we each write a letter to the other as if the other person was in a coma, and to be handed over at the last week of school. To be honest, I don’t remember what I wrote because I couldn’t stop thinking of what she wrote me.

In hers she quoted this song. I remember it was the line, “Little demons by my bed / Whisper secrets / The kind you never hear.” She went on to open up about her bigger feelings for me.

(I did try to get Jawbreaker to come play Delaware in ‘96, but failed!

Jinx Removing

(“Someone said your name, I thought of you alone / I was just the same, twenty blocks away”)

The school year ended, she graduated, and went off to school near Chicago. I was devastated as I was in pretty deep by this point. Our relationship continued on though. We wrote letters to each other and I even visited her once. I was 15 and then 16, a sophomore in high school. The feelings felt immense. Swallowing me whole. I remember telling my parents about it and I remember they listened but didn’t really know what to do. I talked with my older sister and she told me that saying about letting a bird go from its cage to see if it comes back or not. A well-traveled saying but to a 15 year old, it was poignant. I also continued falling deeper into music, playing shows with Network 34 and eventually helping launch Eldritch Anisette. Courtney (from Eldritch Anisette) and I began spending a lot of time together, trading music and writing, and I confided in her about all of this.

Throughout this time, I would come back to this album, as it felt like the best way to communicate and process what it was I was feeling. I remember having to cut the grass at home and only ever listening to this album. Each time this song came on, Cristina would launch into my head. I would sing the lyrics out loud, fighting the mower’s motor. Thinking this song was written for me about her.

Eventually, the school year ended and summer came. I was 16, and got my first real job as a stock boy at a local grocery store (after a short-lived effort as a dishwasher at a cafe). I would end up getting fired from this job about five months later for throwing cans of tomato juice and soup up into the industrial ceiling fan in the stock room to see if I could hit it and watch the contents explode. I did. I didn’t think about the mess it would cause. But well before all that, Cristina returned home from college and got a job at the same grocery store.

We picked up where we left off and then some. Our feelings for each other much more upfront until eventually we confessed them, dared to kiss, and started dating. The next few months over the summer were a whirlwind. We’d see each other often, not just at work, but in the evenings afterward. Time going to her house, not too far away, or her coming to mine. I would drive over in my giant ‘76 Caprice, which leaked oil, feeling terrible about the mess made outside her curb, and we’d watch movies, listen to music, spend time close together. It felt easy, natural. We had fun, laughed, and confided in one another. I couldn’t believe it was actually happening but it was. I had imagined this for so long at this point it also felt very familiar already and like it was meant to be. How could it have been any other way?

Ache

(“Lean your head on mine / Like you used to. (Used to your lean) / I don’t mind if you’re faking it. (Make it seem real)”)

And then, summer ended and so did the relationship. I forget exactly how it ended or how it was communicated, but it just did. Just like that. It was over. I vaguely remember her saying she was in college and needed to be with people her own age, or something like that, or maybe that’s how I tried to explain it to myself. It was hurt and confusion at the same time. I’d spend many nights at Courtney’s apartment listening to music, writing and sharing poetry, talking about all of this. We’d also go to Eagle Diner, drinking coffee, eating french fries (I was straight edge and vegetarian at this point), which I would stretch out over hours, while writing poetry in notebook after notebook. Some of these lines even ended up as anguished backing screams in Eldritch Anisette songs. Courtney remembered it well, in fact. When Eldritch got reissued nearly 30 years later, and we had to write out our lyrics, she looked over at me and just said, “Ohh, Cristina.”

That Fall semester, Cristina and I stayed in touch, however. Our romantic relationship didn’t end badly, it just ended. In fact, I went to visit her in Chicago after we broke up, ostensibly to look at colleges.

On the trip, I brought her a book I’d made for her. A book of poems, hand bound, each page individually crafted and designed, every one different, most of the poems typed out on my manual typewriter.

Writing that sentence now, I can see I was a bit much.

But I’d comb through those notebooks I had, go to the local stationary store to get different kinds of paper, stamps, envelopes, crafts. Some pages were collages, others paintings, others still with drawings or images.

I remember handing it over to her. All this time, all this craft, all this emotion. She knew much of it had to do with her. She also knew how I still felt about her. But she dismissed it all quickly, with a passing comment saying she was simply my muse.

That night I slept on the floor of her dorm room, right next to her bed. Maybe I was in a sleeping bag, but I think it was just the ground and a blanket. I remember the darkness around me and the sense that she was so close and so far away. I remember wishing she’d soften and open back up to me. But that didn’t happen of course. There was a door that was firmly shut.

I wondered whether she had any idea what I was feeling. At sixteen it was so immense that I couldn’t believe no one else could feel it too, being right there, a foot away, in the same room.

I slept badly.

Ashtray Monument

(“After all, it’s not that bad / I still have pictures, I look back / At all the things that we once did / You said I love you, I guess you did”)

Eventually, as these things happen, it all passed by. I moved on. Dated other people. Fell in love again, and fell in love harder. Life moves forward. But in that junior year of high school after we broke up, I remember still trying to make sense of what happened and why, until I came to a simple acceptance: it just is. My friends helped, writing helped, and playing music helped, but ultimately like in this song, I learned that sometimes love can unexpectedly hit you, and grip you so closely that you can’t even breathe or think about anything else, and then just as sharply, simply go away. By the end of that school year, Cristina and I stopped talking. I think the only interaction we had was one time we saw each other at an event in New York City when I was in my early 20s.

The Boat Dreams from the Hill

(“I wanna be a boat / I wanna learn to swim / Then I’ll learn to float / Then begin again / Begin again”)

So, what is all this?

Music can attach itself to something you feel deeply and take on its identity. For years I couldn’t put this record on without being back in that hallway, that year, that ache. That’s changed.

I’ve said in this series that music is a time machine, and I stand by it. But this one doesn’t work that way for me anymore. When I’ve listened to it over the past few decades, it doesn’t bring those feelings back. No, those are long over. I’ve been lucky to love again and even find my real, lifelong love. Instead, it lets me look at those feelings from a distance, like an artifact in a display case at a museum. Behind glass, well lit, labeled, not mine to touch.

And for me now, and even across this piece, what I see is that what’s behind the glass isn’t Cristina. It’s a younger me. A young teenager, growing up fast, with long hair and a t-shirt, an explosion of new feelings, trying to make sense of what was happening to him through music, and through this record.

A few years back Jawbreaker got back together and played their first dates in New York. It was in February 2018 at Brooklyn Steel.

I told my friend Sean I was going and he was dismissive about the whole thing. To be fair, this was the time right when a lot of the bigger punk and hardcore bands from that era started doing reunion shows. Nearly everyone that went out to the shows were older, in their late 30s through early 50s, who had grown up with the music. Rather than a new crowd discovering it. A batch of nostalgia, he said.

I thought about that for a long time. I wondered whether he was right. Whether that’s all this is, a room of people in their forties paying to feel fifteen for two hours.

I don’t think so.

I went and I sang every word at the top of my lungs, and it wasn’t for the band and it wasn’t for the girl. It was for the kid. The one who was so earnest about finding love. The one who believed a teenage romance was going to be the whole of his life. The one who wore his heart on his sleeve where anybody could get at it. The one who thought sincerity would solve everything, and yet who was still had no idea who he was himself or what he actually felt or anything meant. The one who thought this unknown feeling could never be matched let alone surpassed.

It was a chance to look at him and say: hey. It’s ok. You’re ok. It all works out. Things get way better.

That’s not nostalgia. Nostalgia is a longing to go back to a romanticized time and stay there. This was going back to that time to say goodbye.

And I am sure that I was not the only one in that room doing it.

When I told one of my guy friends’ chat groups that this album was on tap for my next entry, the responses were immediate.

My same friend Sean who dismissed the reunion shows as nostalgia told me it was the soundtrack to his most tumultuous summer of love and drama in high school, when he broke the heart of the nice girl he was dating because he was enraptured by the troubled punk girl (thankfully, his troubled punk girl era is long gone).

My friend Steve, a former-monk-turned-potter and still punk in that Dischord style way (and may I add single and a catch!), put it better than I have in this entire piece: a perfect album made more perfect by being 15 and heartbroken.

That’s what this record does. What it’s a soundtrack too. And that’s what the 33 ⅓ book left out.

As a recap on the “perfect punk album” series so far:

#1: Spirit Assembly’s Welcome to Lancaster County

#2: Sunny Day Real Estate’s s/t (aka The Pink Album)

#3: Lungfish’s Rainbows From Atoms

#4: Superchunk’s No Pocky for Kitty

Check out the rest of the site for other posts as well, and let me know what you think!

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It was the first expo of the Delaware Music History Archive, a long-incubated effort recently incorporated as a nonprofit, launched by two of my friends, Chris and Paul. All weekend, the Archive had special exhibits and events to mark the span of musical incarnations across the first state. Saturday was given over to three panel presentations before a show kicked off. I was fortunate to be asked to join the third panel, along with friends Rob Avery, Chad Istvan, and Shane Evans, to speak to the lives of two of Delaware’s music cornerstones: my brother Matt and Nick Rotundo.

I’ve talked about my brother here before (drummer, de facto band manager, architect). For those who don’t know, Nick was also fundamental to the Delaware scene. Drummer and guitarist in bands like Railhed, Walleye, Kill Quota, None More Black. He was also the sound engineer in Delaware, where he launched Clay Creek Studios. He recorded everyone, including most of my bands. I talk about Nick in the write-up on Eldritch Anisette for Numero Group’s Sequoia Boxset, saying, “without Nick, there would be no punk scene.”

I went down thinking a lot about this panel, what I would say, what it would be like, who would be there, and how to share enough in a short amount of time. I went down with a narrow thinking of what the expo would be one thing, but later realized it was much more.

I saw people I hadn’t seen in years standing next to people I’d seen earlier that same day. I saw my old best friend and former bandmate, Tim, in person for the first time in years. I saw Dre, the younger sister of my other best friend at the time, who not just came out to the shows but documented this period through her camera. The BSF crew. The Delaware-to-Brooklyn crew. So many more. All of us a couple decades older, but still with the same wide smiles. It was almost like no time had passed. An instant familiarity.

At one point, my friend Daryl Hyde pointed out that four generations of BoySetsFire bass players were in the same room. Daryl, Rob Avery, me, Chris Rakus. Four people who had held down the same low end in the same band across all those years, standing around together like it was nothing.

I didn’t think anything about that at the time other than agree that we needed a photo (we did get one). But it stayed with me for the rest of the day. I’ll come back to it.

One of the things I was most drawn to was an exhibit by women music photographers from Delaware, with work spanning from the 1970s through the 2020s. Six decades of shows, shot from the front of the stage to the back of the room.

The ‘90s wall was my friend Dre’s work, and I found myself in it more than once. Three of the bands I played in were up there: Eldritch Anisette, Midvale, and The Monsters, which was Eldritch Anisette’s possessed alter ego. In the Monsters photo, I’m behind Tim’s drums, screaming into the microphone.

My parents were at the expo. Early on, they came and grabbed me, a little bewildered, and said there was a photo of someone who looked just like me on the drums, but I never played the drums. They were surprised to learn that I did.

We laughed about it. It was a funny and small revelation about how much of our musical lives had gone on without their noticing. And it brought the whole spirit of that time back to me, the spontaneity of it, the zaniness. How Allen, Tim, and I would mess around at Eldritch Anisette practices. I’d hop on the drums, Tim would grab the bass, and we’d invent alter egos and sing goofy songs about monsters coming to eat people, all over a soundtrack of blast beats and sludgecore. And then somehow we decided it made perfect sense to do that at actual shows. And it did. That was The Monsters.

Someone standing near my parents put it together and said, “Of course, you all drummed.” My dad was a drummer. Matt was a drummer. And, surprise, apparently so was I. What got to me most was that Dre had hung my photo right next to one of Matt behind his kit. The two of us on drums, side by side on the wall, which didn’t happen all that much in life.

And it wasn’t only us. Whole nights came back into focus off that wall. Braid playing at Girls Inc., Jenny Piccolo in Tim’s basement, the Locust stunning everyone on one of their first tours, and lots of Delaware bands, Bessemer Process, Kill Quota, BoySetsFire, Joshua Fit for Battle. Faces of my friends.

What struck me was that Dre shot these as a young teenager; she was (and still is!) younger than me, and she caught it all so clearly. The energy, the dynamism, the emotion, the noise of those rooms. And it was like that down the whole exhibit, one decade to the next, the work of the women who shot them. They weren’t only observing and documenting. They were making it. They were creating the images, the look, the meaning, the legacy of this music across all those years, as much as anyone up on a stage was.

Standing in front of those decades, something shifted for me. My time in that scene, the ‘90s, felt so rich and full and vibrant when I was inside it. It was everything. And here it was, just one section. One column of photos on a wall of them, with decades of other people’s everythings tacked to the left and right.

It reminded me of the spiral “Cosmic Pathway” at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. That place is my therapy grounds, and there’s a walkway there that winds down through the history of the universe, each step standing in for hundreds of thousands of years. You walk the big bang, and then the formation of the elements, and stars, and galaxies, and planets, and you keep walking, and all of that happens before you ever get to Earth. Then you finally get to Earth, and there’s a whole history there too, stretching not just millions but billions of years. And at the very end, the entire span of human beings is the width of a single hair. It puts your time, your place, your problems, yourself in perspective.

It felt something like that. Without the immense expanse of time, of course. But something like that.

There is a possibility that one could remain sitting in that smallness. I find a quieting calmness, like a weighted blanket or a sensory-deprivation tank (yes, I’ve gone to those), in the humbling shock of our own limited perspective and existence. And while there is understanding and peace that offers me, it’s also not the full story. Because even though our own time is less than a hair-width in the existence of the universe, to each of us, it is also everything. It is all we know, and putting aside reincarnation, in this world, it’s all we have. It is both relatively minuscule and all-encompassing. So, I couldn’t and can’t just sit in the smallness.

In fact, standing in front of those decades actually sharpened two things, which led to a different realization.

The first is being present. As I noted at the top of this post, I went down principally to participate in a panel discussion on the lives of my brother and Nick. Two people whose lives ended too soon and who lived it loud while they had it. I was nervous when the panel began. Nervous to be on the stage with Shane, Rob, and Chad, three people I’ve looked up to since I was 13. Nervous to talk in front of all these people, any one of whom could also be on the stage. Nervous to talk about Matt in front of my parents in a public setting. Nervous about doing justice. As the panel started, I could feel the emotion swell. I, of course, remembered the Eldritch Anisette show in California and what happened then. But as I heard Rob, then Chad, then Shane talk, something changed in me. It went from a sadness to a joy. A joy about these two people, the humor they brought, the stories they shared, the experiences we had together. The way they livened up rooms, vans, stages, recording studios. I found two stories about Nick that Matt had written to himself on his phone, and I shared those with the room. The grief is still there, but more so, it felt like a gift to have had the chance to know them both so closely, and to see all the people in the room together, holding this space together, touched by Matt and Nick. Sitting there, the width-of-a-hair feeling didn’t read as sad. It read as an instruction. You get that hair. Live it loud.

The second is the worth of the documentation itself. The archive. That someone kept the flyer. That someone took the photo and labeled it. That someone saved the tape. The zine that my friends Mike and Bryan Louie made as a tribute to Nick and Matt, and the memories written by our friends. None of it remembers itself.

Which brings me to the thing the whole night kept circling and what all this synthesized for me.

What is an archive without the people?

It is a room of objects. It needs the people, and not only the ones who wrote the songs and played them, though of course, them too. It needs the show promoters. The DJs. The visual artists who made the flyers and the album covers. The photographers, six decades of them. The record labels put out bands based on love not units moved. The audiences who showed up and moved. The parents who gave up their basements. Jason Lechmanik talking about the early days of Enoch Collective, Grouchy Greg talking about creating one of the first hip hop magazines, Mike Haley and the Electric Human Project. The sound engineers, like Nick, sitting at the board making four people sound like more than four people. The friends.

Because that panel wasn’t only celebrating Matt as a drummer and de facto manager, or Nick as a musician and sound engineer. It was celebrating them as friends. That’s what a community is for, too. It’s there while you build the thing, and it’s there after, to remember the people who built it with you.

So, back to those four bass players in one room. Daryl, Rob, me, Chris. The player keeps changing, and the low end keeps going, the rhythm keeps driving, because the thing that lasts was never any one of us. It was the whole room that made the music possible and then made sure it got remembered.

That’s what makes music special. It’s what makes it last. It’s what gives it meaning. It’s what makes it worth remembering.

It’s the community.

Thank you Delaware Music History Archive for bringing all this together.

Album: No Pocky for Kitty

Artist: Superchunk

Label: Matador Records (1991)

Runtime: 12 songs, ~34 minutes

Ok. After a couple of heavier and headier posts, let’s have some fun. Which brings me back to my “perfect punk album” series and its fourth entry. The first three (Spirit Assembly, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Lungfish) were in many ways about something unexpected in punk and in my music journey. This one, in my opinion, comes straight at you. A record that isn’t asking you to work for it, and still hits on every single track.

Superchunk. No Pocky for Kitty. Their sophomore album, recorded with Steve Albini over two days in the middle of their early U.S. touring, and released on Matador in 1991. Superchunk is a behemoth in the scene. Fourteen LPs plus four LP/2XLP compilations of 7”s and B-sides. There’s a lot to consider and honestly, several I could choose from (more on that later), but I have to go with their first album I ever heard and that still holds up.

No Pocky for Kitty has no trick. That’s what I love about it. It passes the test by just being good, twelve times in a row, with nothing to excuse. Sometimes a perfect record is just a band writing twelve good songs and not missing once.

The album hits you from the first beat.

A snare kicks in, and then the guitars come down, driving power chords, and you’re launched. It’s like a ripcord being yanked. The guitars are heavy. They sound almost like they’re in a lower tuning for a second, but are driven instead by their full tone and distortion, and the engineering prowess of Albini (it gives me a glimpse of Nirvana’s In Utero, which Albini engineered two years later). The tone is thick and buzzing, and it has no business being this heavy under music this poppy. But that’s the beauty of the record.

Indeed, underneath that weight, the songs are melodic. The chords rock back and forth, that classic bouncing punk melody, and the structures are quite honestly, pop structures, hooks where you expect hooks. Mac’s vocals come in doubled, layered over themselves. Which is maybe why by the second time through any of these songs, you are singing and pointing along.

If I had to put a finger on the sound, it’s a fuller and fresher ‘77 classic punk race car. The Buzzcocks. The Dictators. But warmer and fuller. And it’s got the bounce and the riffs of The Dickies or The Damned or The Saints, that pop-punkiness that moves a room whether the room wants to move or not. Many punk bands, Beach Slang come first to mind, have been chasing this sound ever since.

After the jet engine of “Skip Steps 1 & 3,” they drop into “Seed Toss,” which hints at that particular Superchunk ease they’d bring to this lineage of punk rock. But it’s the chorus I love, the way it sets that lightheartedness against an oscillating, heavy hook. To me, at least, that chorus is the early ‘90s in miniature, and it points straight at the more popular bands coming up: the Breeders, Nirvana. It’s not all high octane, though. For instance, the heavy yet melodic progressions in “Tower” that incorporate dissonant harmonics and neck slides are also emblematic of this era and sound, and are now incorporated as standard.

Their sound on this album carries echoes into the next century, too. There’s Mac’s long yelling/singing “yeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhh!!!!” near the end of “30 Xtra” and of “Press,” and of “Throwing Things,” which I feel like every melodic punk band a decade later in the 2000s does at some point (The Loved Ones on “Jane,” Latterman, None More Black, etc.).

The record keeps going like that. Classic punk sensibilities and a Superchunk sound just starting to find itself, all of it bottled in an early 90s setting.

I’ve written before about how my older sister, Melissa, was the gateway to punk for both me and my brother Matt. I found Lungfish because she had a copy of Talking Songs for Walking. In early 1993 when I was 13, I found Superchunk through her too, in a way, even though she’d never heard of them.

One of the great ways of finding bands before the internet and the streaming algorithms started handing them to you was to read the thanks list in the records you already loved. You’d sit with the insert and work through the names, and the names were a map. They often meant they toured with these bands, were label mates, or at least, friends. It’s a pretty good endorsement. I forget whose record it was, I’m guessing Samiam, but somewhere in one of those inserts I saw it: superCHUNK. And I just thought, damn. That’s a cool name.

And I got lucky, because at that point downtown Newark, Delaware where I lived, had two good independent record stores, Rainbow Records and Wonderland. I went in looking for Superchunk on the strength of the name and the thanks list mention, and they had a cassette of No Pocky for Kitty. I grabbed it.

I played it the second I got home and I was hooked. It wasn’t as abrasive as Minor Threat, I could handle this one, and at the same time it still felt raw, and edgy, and, for me at least, new.

For the next four years I devoured everything Superchunk I could find, and lucky for me, between 1991, when No Pocky was released, and 1996 they produced a lot of it. So many great additional releases in this period: On the Mouth, Foolish, Here’s Where the Strings Come In, Incidental Music.

One thing I didn’t know at the time was that the person who recorded the record was Steve Albini. Although, to be fair to my younger self, his name didn’t even appear on the insert’s credits.

I didn’t know who Albini was yet. I learned that later, first through Shellac, and then, honestly, it took me the better part of a decade to fully connect the dots between musician and engineer. I’d see his name in the credits of records I loved and somehow thought of this as two different people. When it finally clicked, it made perfect sense. Of course, that heaviness, that weight, is him. I also felt like an idiot for not having realized it.

So, I like to think that I fell for this record on its own terms, knowing nothing, not even who the band was, other than its mention on another band’s insert. Maybe this is the best way to fall for anything.

For anyone who needs it, Albini is one of the foundational figures of American underground music. He was a musician in Big Black and Shellac, music and art writer and critic, scene creator, and the sound engineer behind a mountain of records that set the standard for what loud guitars and drums should sound like. He died in 2024, and it was like losing some of that foundation.

He recorded No Pocky the way he recorded most things: straight to tape and with the band playing together in a room. It took place over three overnight sessions in April at Chicago Recording Company, 6pm to 6am, about 36 hours all in, during a break in their tour. They cut it fast, and with the songs already worn in from the road, so the band was as tight as a band can get.

The best thing I’ve read about those sessions is from the guitarist, Jim Wilbur. Albini didn’t want to overdub or have extra guitar lines layered on. Every time Mac wanted to add a part, Wilbur remembers, Albini would just ask, “Why?” Because to him, the sound of the band was the sound of four people. Why would you want to do anything else?

That’s the idea around this record for me. There are no tricks. There are just four people in a room, caught at full speed. Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance of Superchunk, later said that Albini made them sound “bigger than we were in real life,” which is exactly his engineering magic: a recording style built on keeping it simple, and yet the result is enormous.

To be honest, this wasn’t an easy pick. It wasn’t whether No Pocky belongs, but rather because Here’s Where the Strings Come In is also a fantastic record.

I’m picking No Pocky, however, because of what it captures. As I discussed above, this album captures a specific moment and version of Superchunk that they didn’t stay in for long.

I said earlier that they recorded this album fast and in the middle of tour. In addition to being a great recording story, it’s also the reason why this record sounds the way it does. It caught them at a particular week of their life, running at full speed, before anyone had time to think too hard about it.

That didn’t last, which is the other reason I chose it. From On the Mouth onward you start to hear the more considered version of Superchunk: cleaner guitars, more intentional singing, and a songwriterly turn (which eventually gives you Portastatic, Mac’s side project. There are a couple of tracks on this album that hint toward that, like “Throwing Things” and “Sidewalk.” But for the most part, No Pocky is from just before this, when the sound was still raw and half-formed, and the band was playing it hard so they could figure out what it was.

So, this pick is more a choice about which Superchunk I want to stay within, and for me, it’s the one that was still becoming. Perhaps, to be honest, it’s because I was still too.

In October 1994, I saw them play live at the Trocadero in Philadelphia, and I was nervous.

I’d been going to shows for a while by then, but this was only the second one I’d been to at a big club. The first was also the Troc, where I saw Samiam and Bad Religion. And I was nervous for reasons unrelated to the band. I was 14 and couldn’t drive, so I was riding up with older kids from the scene, which, at that age, is its own kind of high-wire act. I was one month into high school, and these guys were seniors, and I think some had already graduated. I remember feeling excited because the older guys who took me up were also Superchunk fans and this was a band I loved and felt I found on my own rather than hearing from someone else in town. It made me feel validated in a way, and since I was heading up with them like I was in a cool membership club. But I was also nervous as hell. I had never really hung out with these guys on my own and I had to occupy the hour drive up and the wait before the bands played and not make a fool of myself and get kicked out of this “club” I now imagined myself part of.

The moment Superchunk started, all of that was gone. The nerves, the older kids, the being-out-of-my-depth. It just burned off in one ball of youthful abandon, and I was down there in the mosh pit, dancing and throwing myself around, and singing along. I remember them playing a lot off of No Pocky (or at least it felt like a lot), and each time it would fill me with more energy and excitement. Bouncing and singing along.

I remember the band’s looks of friendly amusement at me up from their spots on the stage. I’ve never been sure whether it was the way I was throwing myself around (“Are they surprised to see slam dancing?” I wondered) or the fact that I was so obviously a little kid who’d found his way into the room. Probably both. Well, probably the latter.

A record like this, however, doesn’t stop working when you grow up.

In 2007 I got back from a European tour. I’d been playing guitar with Dear Tonight, out with Boysetsfire on what was supposed to be their European farewell tour. Within a week of being back, I was at a mandatory, multi-day work retreat, one of those things at a retreat site in the woods of upstate New York in the summer. After a few weeks on the road with your best friends playing night after night (and even two shows in one night) over several weeks, the last place I wanted to be at was a work retreat. But luckily for me, one of my colleagues was my friend Clare, who had actually put out the recent Dear Tonight full-length on her label Red Leader Records, which she ran with her partner Matt. She offered a way of daily escape: we’d slip out to her minivan, drive off down the wooded roads, smoke cigarettes, and put this album on repeat. We both loved Superchunk. The two of us cruising nowhere in particular, windows down, with No Pocky for Kitty turned all the way up, letting it soar, wide grins on our faces.

Fourteen years after the Troc and the record did the exact same thing to a couple of adults that it had done to a 14-year-old in a pit. It doesn’t age. It just keeps going.

Not every great record needs to be a mystery or break you open. Sometimes the profound thing is just that it hits fast, makes you move, and keeps making you move for thirty years.

post-script:

Found this old letter from Jon with Superchunk in my files. I presume I was asking them about playing Delaware and something about Merge, apparently!

The first time I heard John Coltrane’s Ascension, I had no idea what I was listening to. To be honest, I’m still trying to understand it. I should’ve realized this from the opening of A.B. Spellman’s liner notes, “Be advised that this record cannot be loved or understood in one sitting.”

This was about twenty years ago, when I was living in Brooklyn. My friend Sean lived in the same building and was selling some of his long-held records. That’s a familiar rite of passage for many in the punk scene. The need for rent money, clearing space, taste changes, or some combination of all three drives people to open up their crates to friends. Sean’s was a little different, though. I don’t remember why he was selling them, and I don’t even remember if any punk records were actually included, even though he also came up through punk, including a stint at Maximum Rocknroll. Instead, they included original pressings of classics. Dylan. Springsteen. Stuff I didn’t expect to find in the crates of a guy who worked at MRR.

And, Coltrane’s Ascension.

That one jumped out at me, and I remember Sean telling me that I would love it and that it gets weird.

I already knew Coltrane. Or I thought I did. That came from Tim, my best friend growing up, and one of the best drummers I’ve ever known. A prodigy. We would spend hours every day listening to punk, the whole gamut: from Mohinder to Tortoise to Born Against to Rachel’s (yes, we grouped all this into punk).

But it wasn’t just punk we listened to. At 15, we’d go to jazz clubs, and he would sit in and stun all the old timers, until it reached a point where I remember they’d eagerly call him to the stage. Then we’d head back to his basement and just play, spontaneously, mostly loud and chaotic music until songs got unearthed. That’s how Network 34 was launched and several projects after. I’m pretty sure he’s the one who introduced me to Coltrane when I was around 14. We would dig in together. Giant Steps first. Then My Favorite Things. Maybe a little A Love Supreme, though not enough of it. Mostly the early stuff. Bebop and modal, well before Coltrane really went far out. Still, when he was using heroin, anecdotes about which we would trade back and forth from whatever story we heard.

(I also remember somewhere in this period, the San Diego band Swing Kids formed. We loved them. And Tim shared that he spoke with Justin or Jose from the band, and they said they took the name from the movie of the same title because they saw a similarity between the German youth who embraced swing music in defiance of the Nazis and the punk and hardcore kids of our own time. More on that, and the curious lineage of punk drummers emerging from jazz, in future posts! Back to Coltrane…)

So when I got Ascension about a decade later (this was pre-streaming), I had expected something similar to his bop and modal playing. Something with some structure. In retrospect, I had no idea what to expect. If I’m honest, I didn’t know much about this period of Coltrane at all. I didn’t really know much about jazz really either. I just remember putting it on, waiting for something like Giant Steps or My Favorite Things, and sitting there thinking, “What on earth is this?”

What I heard was nothing I’d heard before. Nothing from Coltrane. Nothing from jazz. Nothing from music.

It was a sonic assault. Eleven players going at once and not one of them getting out of anybody’s way. It was abrasive, explosive. The horns weren’t taking turns. Rather, they were all in there together, shoving, swirling, dancing around each other. Underneath it, the rhythm section kept surging up and falling back, over and over, the way you breathe when you’ve been running hard.

It was screaming something at me. Something urgent. And I couldn’t make out a word of it. I’m still trying to, if I’m being honest.

Though I’ll say this much. Coltrane wasn’t quite sure either. Years later he told Nat Hentoff he didn’t know what he was looking for, only that it would be something that hadn’t been played yet, and that he’d know the feeling when he got it. He described it as “continual looking.”

This is the real sheets of sound. I know Ira Gitler coined that phrase back in the fifties, and I know he meant the earlier Coltrane, those cascading runs where Coltrane shreds apart chords on the Blue Train and Giant Steps records. But to me, at least, I don’t think it gets fully realized until here, when he stops playing inside the parameters and lets the whole thing loose. A room full of players pouring everything out at once instead of one man’s arpeggios.

And then, somewhere, years later, along the way, it clicked. I’d had this exact reaction once before.

I was 13, and it was Minor Threat’s Out Of Step.

That album came out in 1983 and is a cornerstone of punk and my coming of age. When I first heard it ten years after it came out, I couldn’t believe this was the same dude fronting Fugazi. It was like, whoa.

I still remember hearing it for the first time when I was 13. It was like nothing I had ever heard. It was fast. It was loud. The instruments were abrasive, aggressive. And the singer didn’t sing, but yelled, screamed, and lost his mind. And yet it was focused and driving, with a momentum that met my onsetting teenage years with equal force, clarity, and noise. Minor Threat was the first hardcore punk band I ever heard, or at least the first I remember hearing. I devoured the lyrics so that when I cranked the volume past 11, it would be a secret language that I alone understood in my alienated landscape of development suburbia in Delaware. I tacked the insert up on my wall (inspired by the skate bedrooms in Gleaming the Cube). The music was explosive and full. It surrounded me like an earthquake.

It took me a long time to work out what that experience with Ascension was like.

My reference points with Coltrane were limited. I came in through the front door, the Coltrane everybody knows, and I had no vocabulary and no history when Ascension hit me. But, understanding the divergence that Ascension represents, I’m thankful I started with Giant Steps. That expectation made the shock of Ascension so much stronger. Having a reference point to break makes that breakage, that shock, possible.

And there are two different things that can happen when a record breaks something within you. One is offense. That’s the feeling that a rule has been violated. “This is wrong.” “This isn’t music.” The other is astonishment, which isn’t “music shouldn’t do that.” Instead, it’s “I didn’t know music could do that.”

Mine was astonishment. Both times.

Ascension never struck me as wrong. It was like seeing a hurricane for the first time. I had nothing in me built to take in something operating at that scale, and I couldn’t look away from it either. Same thing at 13. Minor Threat didn’t offend me. It opened a door I didn’t know was there. It did startle me. It startled me the same way a hurricane barreling down on you does. It got my attention. It made me brace for impact until I learned I could fly along with it.

The offense belonged to other people. And seeing that helps me find the link between these two styles of music: their transgression.

I want to be precise about it, because transgression isn’t the same as different, and it isn’t the same as experimental. Transgression needs a rule to break, and it needs somebody holding that rule who feels it give. Coltrane experienced that. Critics called this stuff “anti-jazz.” Audiences who had followed him for years, who loved him, got vocal about what the hell he thought he was doing.

This wasn’t the first time it had happened in jazz. Amiri Baraka’s argument in Blues People is that bebop was built the way it was partly to be hard to copy, after swing had been absorbed and watered down by the white mainstream. Every time the music got accepted and taken, something came along that supposedly “shouldn’t be.” It was a rejection of musical stagnation and co-option. It was a reaction to alienation. It was a search for self and collective discovery and freedom. Jazz started this way, and bebop and free jazz were arguably the biggest examples of this within jazz itself.

Punk ran a similar pattern. Punk emerged as a rejection of the mainstream and commercial rock and pop of its day. Punk gets picked up and sold back, so you get hardcore. Hardcore hardens into its own orthodoxy with its own gatekeepers, so you get whatever came next, which in my corner of it meant bands that expressed power through means other than raw explosion and let feeling into it, and got mocked for that by the same scene that had itself been mocked ten years earlier. I saw this firsthand, playing in early “emo” bands (as I mentioned in my last post).

It’s also not transgressive in the sense of mere provocation. It’s not simply shock value (which, if I’m being honest, is how I always saw some punk acts, like the Sex Pistols). It’s not performative or role-playing. It’s a transgression that arises from the music’s emotionality. It is not a costume to put on, but rather a life to express.

That’s a thread I keep pulling on, and it’s where these two musics, punk and jazz, actually meet: music as transgression.

A.B. Spellman was right with his liner note advisory. I was more startled by Ascension than I was by Minor Threat. I wasn’t ready for it. I put it back into my collection and returned to the earlier periods of jazz (when I would listen to jazz at all). It wasn’t until recently, about two decades later, that I found myself ready to come back to that discomfort with a curiosity to understand it.

As I mentioned in my first post on this blog, it was after a trip to Portugal in 2023, where I wandered into a record store and felt lost amid the collection of records from around the world. All sorts of jazz, but much beyond that, too. All of a sudden, as someone who felt their life had been defined largely by music, I realized there was so much more to learn and experience.

I came home and started to dig in. Since 2023, I’ve taken a dozen jazz classes via Jazz at Lincoln Center, read dozens of books, gone to concerts, watched documentaries, and bought hundreds of records: Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and of course, much more Coltrane, among many others. And I can hear what’s happening on that record now in a way I couldn’t then.

Four questions have been driving all of this. Where does this music come from? How does it differ from what came before it? Why does it differ? And what is it all about? I’m not finished with any of them.

As I dove deeper into jazz, one of the things that kept striking me is the resonance between jazz, especially the free/loft jazz of the 1960s-1970s, and the DIY punk I grew up with. This blog, in part, is part of how I’m thinking it through.

Ok. Some caveats, because I want to be clear about what I’m claiming here.

I’m not claiming a direct lineage but rather exploring resonances. Punk has plenty of well-documented ancestries, and I’m not trying to displace any of them. Rock ‘n’ roll, garage, the Stooges and the MC5, early metal, dub, some reggae. Anybody who wants to tell me punk came out of rock is right, of course.

But if you follow that line back far enough, you go from punk to rock ‘n’ roll to rhythm and blues to the blues itself. And when you trace jazz back, the blues is sitting right there too. This is not a lineage claim, to be clear. I’m not drawing a line from Coltrane to Ian MacKaye. But it does mean these two musical forms are distant branches off the same root, and that the family resemblance I keep hearing isn’t coming out of nowhere.

And there are other distinctions I don’t want to hide. Free jazz (and jazz as a whole) came out of a Black American musical tradition and Black liberation politics, and the DIY punk I grew up in did not. Also, bebop and free jazz musicians, whether Bird or Monk, or Coltrane, Coleman, or Shepp, were formidably trained musicians breaking rules they had completely mastered, where punk’s whole founding premise was that formal training and instrumental mastery was a gate you didn’t need to pass through. And bebop and free jazz are built on improvisation in real time, individual in the first and collective in the second, whereas for punk, even if songs written through some form of collective improvisation, they ended up written nonetheless, and then played more or less the same way night after night.

Those distinctions are real. But I keep coming back to the continuities anyway.

As you can tell from my posts so far, the perspective I’m bringing is, for the most part, a punk understanding of jazz. Not a musicologist’s, or a scholar’s, or someone who grew up in the jazz scene.

So what is it that I want to get into? I want to explore how the infrastructure of both scenes was built when nobody else would have them, the labels and zines and distros and the spaces run out of lofts and basements and apartments. How fast the bands burned through and died in both, and how the same handful of players kept turning up in new configurations. The politics. What’s actually happening in the music itself, the harmony and the meter and the timbre, where the two converge and where they don’t at all. And one that my friend Joshua flagged for me: while most guitar players and bass players in punk learned by ear from their friends, most drummers learned in school, and what they learned in school was jazz.

But I wanted to start with the sound because that’s what hit me first. Abrasive. Caustic. Hard to sit with. Structured chaos. Music that isn’t asking to be liked. You don’t land on a sound like that by accident. You get there by refusing something, and both of these musical styles were refusing, in part, the same thing. A mainstream that had already decided what music was supposed to sound like, who was supposed to make it, who was supposed to own it, and what it was for.

But refusal on its own is a wall, and what I keep hearing underneath it is something else. People are trying to find a purer way to get at what they actually feel. To put the deepest part of themselves into sound without sanding it down first, without translating it into something more agreeable on the way out. Which is why it comes out abrasive. The feeling itself was abrasive.

Still, the most uncompromising music that both of these scenes produced was made to be released. This implies a hope that it will land on somebody else, and that they hear the thing you couldn’t say any other way, and that, maybe, at least for the length of the song neither of you are alone in it. Even within the chaos, screaming, or sonic assault of Ascension or Out of Step, the music was about building connection. Connection both within the band and across human experience. And building on that connection is what I’ll try to do further here.

However, over the past four months, life, or more precisely life and death, has come at me fast. And lately I’ve been sitting, and thinking, and feeling a lot about what I can only call the healing power of music. Two things have happened in these past four months that struck me so deeply that, to be honest, I didn’t even realize there was a place that deep.

So, I’m taking a pause to share those two things here.

The first is that on March 28, my brother Matt unexpectedly died.

Matt was two and a half years older than me. Over our 40-plus years of life together, we had a deeply close and loving relationship, and also a complicated and even turbulent one. Like brothers do, but also in our own particular way. It’s something I was still working through, in my own way, right up until his death. There was a lot of pain and hurt in it. There was also a profound love that you only know as a brother and, at times, as a best friend.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that music defined our lives, and certainly our life together.

I grew up listening to and playing music with him. I remember as young kids, maybe six and eight, sitting in the back seat of our parents’ car listening to our dad’s Doobie Brothers cassettes, imploring him to drive faster and turn the music up! I remember Matt dubbing me Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard tapes and using his drawing talent to copy the album art onto the covers. I remember us listening to Tone Lōc and Young MC on repeat and spitting out the rhymes together. And I remember how proud he seemed of me when I “discovered” Faith No More on my own at nine years old.

That love of music turned into making it pretty fast. When he was around 10, in the late ‘80s, he started playing drums. Our dad had an old Gretsch kit up in the attic from his own days playing. My parents, sick of Matt beating on me, sent him up there to beat on the drums instead. And he did. And he kept at it.

About five years later, after growing up listening to him constantly play along to Led Zeppelin, and then Helmet and Rage Against the Machine, and then punk, I’d fallen deep into music myself and picked up a guitar. We took lessons at the same music shop in town. We’d practice and jam together, sometimes with our dad on keyboard for renditions of “House of the Rising Sun,” which feels like we played a hundred times.

Around then, Matt joined his first band, Swivel. They practiced in our basement, so I was home for basically all their practices. I saw and heard, up close, what it was like to start and be in a band, from the technical aspects to the friendship aspects. For some reason, they never seemed to get annoyed by me. They ended up recording their demo in our basement too, and I was around for that, getting to see the whole process, and making friends with Nick Rotundo, who engineered it, along the way. Their first show, which was in a basement, was also the first punk show I ever went to: my brother’s band, in somebody’s basement, and that was the door. I somehow even got into a bar in Wilmington where they played alongside local bands Lean and Nine.

Incidentally, Swivel, Lean, and Nine broke up shortly afterward, and some of their members, including my brother, went on to form Boy Sets Fire. They also formed and practiced in our basement. I still have a photo of my journal entry around the time that happened. Here it is:

From there, our music lives ran alongside each other for years. I started bands, Network 34, Eldritch Anisette, Dorian Gray, and joined DC-based Midvale, playing with BSF dozens of times throughout. Eventually, I ended up touring Europe with BSF in nearly every capacity, first as a guitar tech, then with my own band Dear Tonight, then as a drum tech, and then joining the band itself, on bass, going on tour, writing new songs, and recording. We saw more bands together than I can remember. Some of my best memories are standing arm in arm with him, on the side of the stage at some festival, watching and singing along to Social Distortion, the Bouncing Souls, Foo Fighters, and many others. For a long stretch throughout my 20s and early 30s, my brother and I were in the same bus, the same venue, in the same band, doing the thing we’d been doing in the basement since we were kids.

Before the recent reunion shows of Eldritch Anisette, the last show I ever played was with Matt. It was the Area 4 festival in Germany in 2012. There were over 70,000 people in the audience. It was the last show of the tour. I remember Matt and I were locked in that day. I remember jumping off his drum riser countless times, and I can still hear the blast of his kick drum.

Not long after, Matt quit the band, or was kicked out, depending on who’s telling it. And I was told to choose: him or the band. There was nothing I loved more than getting out there, each day, and playing music to hundreds and thousands of strangers. Playing this thing you helped create and seeing and feeling their reaction to it, and from that, building a connection together. But BSF was never my band. It was his band. So, I chose him. I quit.

I’d do it again. But it didn’t fix anything. Our relationship got hurt in the process too, and I walked away from the whole thing. I didn’t just leave the band. I left music. I couldn’t go to shows. I couldn’t pick up a guitar. I didn’t want anything near me that reminded me of it, because all of it reminded me of loss.

That lasted years. What finally broke it was my daughter. She was about three, and she pointed at one of my guitars and asked what it was. So I took it down and played for her. And she responded immediately, bouncing along. That was the first time in a very long time.

I didn’t play with a band again until 14 years after that last BSF show, when Eldritch Anisette got back together, almost thirty years after we’d last played. Which brings me to the second thing that struck me, although in a completely opposite direction.

On the day this past March when my parents called to tell me Matt had been moved to the ICU, I hung up the phone and picked up my bass guitar.

This was not a conscious decision. I didn’t think I should play something. My hands just went, and my p-bass was the closest instrument to me. And I played the same thing over and over, for a long time, and at some point I noticed that what I was playing had become a song.

So I recorded it and sent it to Allen and Courtney from Eldritch. I didn’t tell them anything about it. No context, no explanation of what had happened or when I’d written it.

Some time later, they wrote back. They’d each written parts. And the parts fit exactly, the emotion and the tenor of it, like they’d been in the room. Without a word from me, they knew what the song was about. When I finally told them what had happened and when I’d written it, they said they’d already understood.

The three of us and JD worked on it and made it a real song. And we played it live at our two reunion shows this past June, the first shows Eldritch Anisette had played in 29 years, and the first shows I played since sharing a stage with my brother.

Before we played it, I had to say something.

I talked about Matt. I talked about him recently, unexpectedly dying. About how we grew up playing music together, and how he was the reason I picked up the guitar. I said that the last time I stood on a stage and played live, it was with him. I talked about how I wrote the basis for the song after getting that call from my parents, and how Courtney and Allen could just tell what it was about. I talked about how it made me truly appreciate how music is a vessel, something that can hold our emotions, something we can express into and then hand to other people. That it isn’t only self-expression, it’s collective experience, and unity. How this song would never have been fully written, and we would never be standing on that stage if it weren’t for all the people in the audience who gave us the support and courage to reunite and do so. I talked about how music holds whatever you put in it: grief, joy, anger, frustration, love, all of it. That we can express our own feelings and connect to somebody else’s at the same time. And that the music can change shape as other people touch it, in ways you don’t expect and couldn’t do alone.

Then I thanked everybody, and each of the people in the band. And then I said, I love you, Matt.

And then we tried to start the song, but I was gone.

I don’t have a better word for it. I was just gone. It felt like being back on the podium at his funeral. I tried to remind myself how the song went, but couldn’t. I came in off-time. I tried again and couldn’t find it. I couldn’t remember how the song went. I couldn’t remember what time it was in. I had written this thing myself, out of the worst day of my life, and standing there in front of 1,400 people, I could not play it.

The knowledge that over a thousand people were looking at me came through clearly. So, I said out loud, I’m sorry, my emotions were getting the better of me.

And then something so unexpected and beautiful happened.

The crowd started clapping. In unison, all of them, giving me a count. And cheering. And I could hear people calling out that they loved me. A room full of people, almost all of them under 25, none of them born the last time this band played a show, holding a stranger up.

Then JD dropped in on the hi-hat, I could focus on it, and I had it. I found my footing and we played the song.

It took me a month to move past the initial embarrassment and be able to look back at this directly.

Here’s what I saw. I just stood there and told the crowd that music is a vessel, that it holds whatever you put into it, and that once you release it, it becomes collective. And then I fell apart, but the room caught me and handed it back to me. What I was trying to describe just happened to me in front of everyone.

There’s another layer too. When Eldritch Anisette was playing the first time around in the mid-‘90s, we’d end up on bills with tough-guy hardcore bands, and we got mocked for being too “emo.” Too much feeling. Not enough breakdowns. Not tough enough. A girl singer. And here was a new generation, nearly thirty years on, and their answer to a someone losing it on stage was to support them through it. In many ways, it felt like a do-over. And, what’s more, it felt like healing. Not just for the band, but for what we were trying to do, and for what I had been going through.

And it was the drummer who counted me back in. The last time I stood in a stage was with my brother, and he was the drummer.

Several people came up to me after the show to tell me about their own losses. That’s not nothing. It’s the whole thing, actually. The vulnerability wasn’t a weakness up there, it was the door. Standing in front of strangers and being unable to hold it together turned out to be the thing that let them in.

I don’t really have a conclusion for this. And, I guess that grief doesn’t have one either. I’m still in it, still finding my way through, and there are days it’s very heavy.

Now, however, I do have gratitude. For all these things: a venue full of kids who didn’t know me and clapped anyway, a band who understood my song without explanation, for music to carry what I struggle to hold, and for a brother who got sent to the attic to beat on his drums and never stopped.

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Album: Rainbows From Atoms

Artist: Lungfish

Label: Dischord Records (1993)

Runtime: 11 songs, ~40 minutes

So, I’m now three entries in on this perfect punk album series, and I think this may be one of the most controversial selections I’ll offer. Who knows, though. I’m often surprised. But I figured, I don’t want to wait on it; I want to throw this out now, and see what happens. It’ll keep me honest and push me to keep digging deep to articulate why I select what I select. I’ll warn you: this is a long one, so dig in when you have the time.

The first one I wrote about, Spirit Assembly’s Welcome to Lancaster County, is beloved but undervalued in large part because it’s been intentionally kept off streaming services. But it was important for me to start with one that was close to home and wouldn’t be an obvious choice except for those who grew up with them (don’t worry, there will surely be a Fugazi entry). The second one, Sunny Day Real Estate’s self-titled album, or LP2, or The Pink Album, as I called it, comes from a scene heavyweight, one where it’d be a shock if they weren’t included, albeit most people talk about Diary. This third selection, Rainbows From Atoms, from the Baltimore natives and Dischord Records stalwarts, Lungfish, I suspect, may raise some eyebrows. So, let’s go.

The reason I suspect there will be some controversy is that while some friends love Lungfish, they have a reputation not just for repetition but for monotony. The standard critique is that if you’ve heard one Lungfish song, you’ve heard them all. That their albums bleed together. And while I think some of that reflects a laziness on the listener’s part, I get it. There is repetition within their songs, and a familiar motor that drives across many of the tracks. And for a series on perfect punk albums that’s built on one test, no skippable track, Lungfish’s musical style puts my test to the test.

First, some background. Lungfish has been a constant. They’ve put out 12 albums from 1990 to 2012. For me, when I listen to them, I hear Baltimore all over it. It brings to mind, for instance, the dissonant runs of Tonie Joy (Moss Icon, Universal Order of Armageddon, Born Against). Baltimore has continued to produce angular, trance-leaning music to this day, as seen in the soundscapes of the avant-garde, jazz/post-rock band Horse Lords. It’s Baltimore punk to me. And growing up in the scene in Newark, Delaware, this loomed large.

I actually found Lungfish through my older sister, Melissa. In fact, she was the one who found the door to punk for both my brother and me. She propped it open, and then Matt and I barged on through. Not only did she do this by the handful of albums she had, but more through her friend network. She gave us immediate credibility in the scene (never mind even making us aware there was a scene!). Of course, Matt and I had to find our own way, but at the very least, we weren’t met with contempt or dismissal when we showed up. Since she was cool, we were given a pass. And when you’re 14, and everyone else is 19 to 25, it means everything. It was acceptance.

I would often sneak into my sister’s room when she was out (which was often), and go through her CD collection. All these bands, with such strange names at the time: Samiam, Jane’s Addiction, The Cure, Poster Children, Jawbreaker. That’s how I first found Lungfish back around 1993, and their 1992 album (and first on Dischord Records), Talking Songs for Walking.

I was drawn in immediately. But it wasn’t until the last five years or so, and, truthfully, not until I was in my free jazz and spiritual jazz deep dive, which brought me to Indian ragas, that I could truly appreciate them. Because here’s the thing about Lungfish, and about Rainbows From Atoms in particular: the repetition is the point.

With Lungfish, you know what you’re going to get. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes, it can feel repetitive. But it’s meant to be. It’s meant to be meditative, a way to lose your sense of time and place and self inside a rhythmic sound. The repetition is the design.

Which is exactly where it collides with my test. The whole point of a Lungfish record is to sink in and lose yourself, to let the tracks blur into one long meditative flow. But “no skippable song” asks the opposite question: does each track stand on its own? Those two things look like they’re in tension. A record built to dissolve into a single entity shouldn’t also be a record of eleven distinct songs. And yet, Rainbows is both at once. You can let all forty minutes run as one continuous thing, and you can also find each track holds its own shape. That’s how it passes.

Understanding Lungfish the way I do now helps me make sense of the lasting impression from when I got to see them and play with them back in 1996.

The show was in Delaware with my band Network 34, in a church hall. There was a stage in the hall, but all the bands of course set up on the floor. I was a teenager. They were not, and that was the first thing that hit me, before a single note. These were actual adults. And on Dischord! They were legit. Grown men, calm and a little remote and cool in a way that had nothing to do with trying to be. It was honestly kind of imposing. And then they started. Higgs stood up there with his voice, his hands and arms, covered in tattoos, moving in slow, incantatory shapes over the top of the drone the other three were building, and I swear a spell was being cast on the room. It was hypnotic. It was also, if I’m honest, a little unsettling. I didn’t know whether to move or hold still. I took photos that night, and even looking at the stills months and years later gave me the same feeling. I’ve seen a lot of bands and played a lot of shows, and that is still one of the strangest and best experiences I’ve ever had in a room with a band. A séance is the word I keep coming back to.

That’s the spirit of it, and it’s also written all across Rainbows From Atoms. I want to get into the mechanics of the songs though, because the drone isn’t just a mood, it’s built, and in examining this we can understand another approach to art and music.

First off, the thing that keeps all that repetition from going flat is the groove. It’s not drone for drone’s sake. The bass gives bluesy lines. The guitar plays octaves up and down the fretboard. So the part that’s repeating is already full of motion and weight, which is exactly what lets you fall into it without it ever going dead. A single beat repeated is monotony. A deep groove repeated is a trance.

I had no words for the droning quality when I first heard them at 13 or when I played with them at 16, but do now, because of my recent deep dive into experimental jazz. It’s the same thing a good Indian raga does, and the same thing the spiritual, Eastern-facing end of jazz does. John and Alice Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders’ explorations that rather than being about chord changes, are about staying in one place until it cracks open. Using that repetition as a meditative, even metaphysical, reaching for something beyond yourself.

You can hear the method announce itself in the first song. “Instrument” kicks off on spiraling guitars and a long vocal howl, Higgs’s voice quavering as he bends it downward and holds it out there in the air. No words yet. Just tone. My head bobs along, my feet move, immediate and involuntary.

Then comes “Abraham Lincoln,” layered vocals stacked on the chorus, the guitar clean but with the gain pushed up and the reverb wide open, so the whole thing swirls around your head like weather. The bass walks, and your head goes with it, back and forth. And the drums do most of their work on the hi-hats, building the rhythm as atmosphere instead of assault. No blast beats. No big crash cymbals. Which is its own quiet argument about punk, and one I’ve come to believe in: you can have every bit of the energy and the power without a single blast beat or cymbal crash. Power is a feel, not a volume.

This is also a song where Higgs’s words push up through the wash and grab you. “Will you resist the burning urge to burn? / Will you refuse your right to choose your type of execution? / That cushion that you’re sitting on.” Most of the time, you’re not parsing his words; you’re receiving them, the way you take in a chant. The words aren’t information. They’re one more loop. But every so often, one surfaces clean and lands, and it lands harder for everything around it that didn’t.

And then, so as not be pinned down as pure mystic drone, they throw “Animal Man” at you. For me, it harks back to the post-punk of the late seventies and early eighties, almost a Talking Heads kind of vibe, jittery and bright and a little funny. There’s a playfulness to it. The fun is what keeps the seriousness from tipping into drudgery.

Line up “Instrument,” “Abraham Lincoln,” and “Animal Man,” and they’re unmistakably the same four people doing the same thing, and they’re also, clearly, three different songs reaching in three different directions. The sameness is real, and the distinctness is real, both at once.

Then, there’s “Fresh Air Cure,” which has to be one of the best grooves laid down in punk. I don’t say that lightly. It’s the fullest version of everything I’ve been describing, the bluesy bass and the octave guitar and the hi-hat push all locked in so deep that you stop noticing the groove and just find yourself inside it. It’s the track where the sinking-in is most total and yet still playful.

“Open House” is where you should put on the headphones, because of what they do with the vocals. Higgs’s main vocal comes up the left channel, and a reverberating echo of it answers from the right, so he’s on one side of your head singing across to the other. It turns your skull into a room. Or better, a cave, a space you go down into and explore.

“8.14.2116” lets the guitar fly. Where the rest of the record builds its drone horizontally, this one goes vertical, layering guitar over guitar until the tracks smear into a single spiraling thing. And it points forward as much as back. You can hear it setting a path toward what someone like Bill Orcutt would do years later with spiraling, abstract guitar. The raga was the ancestor. This is the descendant, showing up early.

The intro of “You Might Ask Me What” always stuns me. What on earth is Chriest doing here? I sat there, a guy who’s played bass and guitar for over thirty years, thinking, “How is that 4/4?” I’d have sworn it was off-time, floating, landing in all the wrong places. It isn’t. The line is just drawn across the bar crooked, hung off the downbeat so the “one” keeps hiding, and it never once actually breaks the meter.

In my last post, writing about the Pink Album, I talked a lot about time signatures, “Waffle” dropping to 3/4, “J’Nuh” running through 9/8 and 7/8. That was strangeness written into the time signature. This is a different. The strangeness is smuggled inside standard time.

And a note on the gang vocals on the outro. There’s a MacKaye in the pile. Not Ian, who produced the record, but his brother Alec, of Faith and Ignition, DC hardcore down to the bone. Which is perfect timing, because it stamps the record’s punk credentials right as I’m about to call it something else entirely.

So then what is all of this, really? Lungfish was advanced art school for punk music.

Punk started simple. That was the whole premise: three trusty chords. But the music didn’t stay there. By Revolution Summer and on into the mid-90s, the stuff I’ve already written about here, Spirit Assembly, SDRE, was anything but simple. And out at the far edge, you had bands making it genuinely harder, the discordant lurch of Angel Hair, the hardcore math-rock of 1.6 Band or The Crownhate Ruin. So there’s a whole spectrum of complexity in this music.

The mistake with Lungfish, and with Rainbows especially, is to think it’s down at the simple end of that spectrum. It isn’t. What Lungfish practices isn’t simplicity. It’s subtraction. Simplicity is not having had more. Subtraction is starting with everything and grinding it away on purpose.

I’ve been revisiting Leonard Koren’s book On Creating Things Aesthetic, where he talks about making art as a set of intentional operations: combining, reconfiguring, extending, and stripping down. He even names repetition itself as one of the operations, which flips the whole monotony complaint on its head. Lungfish’s songcraft, on full display here, is a process of aesthetic subtraction.

Every album I’ve written about here has shown me something about what music even is. Rainbows From Atoms teaches a different one: that music can let you disappear.

Not play in the background. That’s easy, any record can be wallpaper. I mean the opposite direction entirely. If you let it, this record doesn’t sink into the background, it lets you sink into the background. You stop being a person listening to an album and become one more element in the loop, and for a few minutes, the whole exhausting machinery of being yourself just powers down. Subtraction, taken all the way to the end, is the self coming apart. Not as loss, but as a merging with everything by letting go of the ego.

Which is a strange thing to want from a punk record, a genre mostly built on the exact opposite. On asserting yourself. But it’s in there, in each of the elements. The record is offering you the chance to not be yourself for the length of a side. To sink in and let go. All you have to do is let it.

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That’s the third in my ‘perfect punk album’ series. Let me know what you think!

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As a recap so far:

#1: Spirit Assembly’s Welcome to Lancaster County

#2: Sunny Day Real Estate’s s/t (aka The Pink Album)

#3: Lungfish’s Rainbows From Atoms

And my intro post for this whole Substack: Nothing You Can Hold: An Introduction.

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Album: Sunny Day Real Estate (LP2, but we always called it The Pink Album)

Artist: Sunny Day Real Estate

Label: Sub Pop (1995)

Runtime: 9 songs, ~37 minutes

My first jump into this series started with an album relatively close to home and not on streaming services, Spirit Assembly’s Welcome to Lancaster County. This time, I’m going in the opposite direction. But first, a confession:

I didn’t like Sunny Day Real Estate at first. There. I said it. I remember hearing Diary for the first time from my brother. I think it was on a CD in his car, shortly after it was released. And it just didn’t do it for me. I’d love to say, of course, I recognized and loved this genius when I first heard it. But I didn’t. The music felt slow. The production was too clean. And even though I had been listening to vocals from Ian MacKaye’s yells in Minor Threat to Blake Schwarzenbach’s guttural singing in Jawbreaker to the nasally voice of Fat Mike, these vocals were repelled me at first. I didn’t even resonate with the name. Or the album artwork. So I didn’t connect with it. And I know I wasn’t the only one, even if nobody wants to admit that now. If that’s you too, I’m here for you. You’re not alone. Your secret is safe with me.

But I don’t think that was me being slow (even at 14-15 years old), not really. I think these records were just genuinely divergent. It’s hard to remember from here, now that SDRE is carved into the canon and every band cites them, but in the DIY scene of that moment, they were startling. Truly different from everything around them. I didn’t have the ears for it at first listen. And some things are startling enough that it takes a few listens before you even understand what you’re hearing.

I talked in my last post about how our relationship and association with music, or with certain songs, can evolve over time, or pull us back to that one moment, on that one couch, listening to that one song. I said music, as an art form, a communication and emotive device, is not static. It’s also not static in the sense that our own understanding of the music can change. While the song may remain the same, it comes along with us as we live and change. Things we used to love may now seem trite and insignificant. What at first might repel us may soon, or even years later, finally dawn on us and make us play it on repeat. It’s the beauty of music. We can always come back to it and give it another try. Even if we’re not ready for it at first, it’ll be there waiting for us until we are. Regardless of the intensity of the genre, recorded music, as an art form, is patient and forgiving.

That was SDRE for me. After a few weeks of giving it a go, taking a break, and trying again, which, as a 15-year-old growing up in the punk scene, is like a couple of years, it clicked.

So you’d figure Diary is the one I’d write up. It’s the beloved one, the one everybody names. But it doesn’t make this series. This whole “perfect punk album” series runs on one test, as I laid out in my last post: no skippable song. And “Phuerton Skeurto” is a skippable song. I’m sorry. It just is. It might work on Jeremy Enigk’s Return of the Frog Queen (which is great, but who among us wasn’t slightly disappointed upon hearing it that it wasn’t more like SDRE?), but here we’re just waiting for it to pass. A pretty little piano interlude I’ve reached over and skipped more times than I can count. Or thought “great, I have 2 and a half minutes to step away from this record and get back in time for ‘Shadows.’” This album is amazing. Don’t get me wrong. It’s even likely to have their best songs. But one skip, and the record’s out. Otherwise, this isn’t really a test, is it?

The record that passes the test is the one that came after, the one with the pink cover and nothing else on it. No words, no photos, no liner notes, no details, no name. Officially, it’s self-titled; the discographers call it LP2, but my friends and I always just called it The Pink Album, so that’s what I’m calling it here. Nine songs. Everyone earns their spot.

What I didn’t know at the time but only learned years later was how this record was written pressing right up against the band’s imminent collapse. Apparently, some of the quick resolutions in songs may have been due to band dynamics and recording management rather than intentional song craft. And, thankfully, my ears weren’t deceiving me; a lot of what Jeremy sang was just sound, placeholders for lyrics that weren’t written, finished, or recorded. Sub Pop released the record when the band had already called it quits.

But this type of band lifecycle was so common in the punk scene that I knew and grew up in. Bands formed, played, broke up, reformed as new entities, went off in different directions. Often enough with some of the same members. And for the really great bands, which obviously SDRE was, I sometimes think that’s the way it had to be. That amount of energy, that amount of emotional pressure and release, that amount of musical power is near impossible to sustain. It is like a supernova, where the star burns through its massive energy until its weight and gravity make it collapse in on itself, until all that force, all that energy, erupts into a massive explosion. And The Pink Album, in my opinion, captures that moment of convergence and eruption.

What I heard, knowing none of the backstory, was that there’s a breath to the playing. That’s the best word I have for it. The songs inhale and exhale. There is space in these songs, among the instruments, whereas Diary is much more compact in sound. The drums capture it best, played with precision and skill, but also with ease. And it’s whimsical, which is not a word a common description for SDRE, all that anguish and grandeur, but it’s in there. Melodies that skip where you expect them to trudge. It’s across nearly every bass line. And dare I say it, there is an optimism across the tracks. The major chord progressions help, but it goes beyond these. Across the album, there is a lightness moving through even the heaviest passages, like the band is playing with the songs and not just playing them.

Two foundational elements that give it this air and movement are the songs’ time signatures and William Goldsmith’s drumming. Throughout the album, the band plays with time signatures beyond a standard 4/4. This gives both more space for runs and a swing-like propulsion that links the songs. “Friday,” the lead track, kicks it off in a 6/8 time signature. This gives the song a lilting movement and space. “5/4”, despite its name, also comes in at 6/8, although William plays it differently than most with snare accents on the third quarter note (with the kick on the first and fourth) in the verse’s measures giving it a more unexpected movement before running steady in the choruses (which is actually how he plays “Friday” as well but here it’s more isolated). “Waffle” kicks off in 4/4 and drops to 3/4. “J’Nuh” goes from 9/8 to 6/8 to the bridge, which transitions between measures of 4/4 and 7/8. There’s a lot happening here. And it’s all feel.

Which brings me to Goldsmith. His drums. My goodness. From the time signatures to his syncopation to his fills, he plays with a musicality across the record that sets the bar for everyone. Musicians and listeners alike. I don’t know a single person who can’t help but air drum some of his fills. “Rodeo Jones.” “Red Elephant.” Forget about it. His drum passages are among the most memorable parts of the songs. And with his feel, there is often the sense that he’s riding slightly behind the beat. This opens the sound up immensely, much as John Bonham would. And then there’s his drum tones and sound on this album. The snare pierces, not in an unpleasant way, but rather serves as the lighthouse across the record. Can I call it perfect? I think so.

And the vocals. Ok, so, a lot of the vocals on this record are not words. I couldn’t understand half of what Enigk was singing, and it did not matter even slightly. The feeling came through anyway. The voice works like another instrument, pure melody and urgency, and you stop needing the words to mean anything in particular. (Years later, I learned a lot of it really was gobbledygook, placeholder syllables that never became lyrics.) But then, out of all that wash of melody and yearning, a line will cut through clean and land like a knife. Some of the most emo lines out there. Like “You remind me of a secret, place woe” from “Waffle.” Or “Had a dream that you still loved me / is it my imagination?” from “Theo B.” These lines puncture through, right in the heart, surfacing out of a record where most of the words dissolve into sound.

That’s the texture of the whole album. Mostly, you feel it. The time signatures. The drumming. The vocal melodies and lines. Nate Mendel’s sweeping runs on his bass keep time and set the themes. Occasionally, it tells you exactly what it means, and those moments hit harder because of everything around them that doesn’t. “Emo” is a term I’ve resisted ever since I first heard it (and still find it strange being placed deep within it with my band, Eldritch Anisette), but if SDRE is the quintessential emo band, it’s not only the emotional quality of the lyrics or melodies, but it’s the feel that captures the entire sound demonstrated across this album, the way the band writes and plays. (Hint: remember this in future posts when I talk about connections between punk and jazz! *update: that post is now live, “A Love Supreme is an Emo Record.”)

The song that illustrates what this record does is “Waffle.” I threw it on again for this, really listened, and it’s even more stunning than I remembered. It isn’t a single build with a single payoff. It’s build, crest, gone. Over and over, each peak lasting a few seconds and dropping away before you can hold it, the cycle tightening as the song goes. The crests get bigger. That whole back third is a dense run of the biggest ones, stacked close together, each still vanishing fast.

And then, at 4:09, it finally breaks all the way open. The biggest lift in the song, and the only one that doesn’t snap back. It resolves, and it’s just gone. Song’s over. To me, that’s the payoff the whole thing was climbing toward. But I get that for some people it resolves so fast it barely registers as a resolution at all, and the song ends feeling unresolved. It holds both. Regardless, the focus of the song is the rising tension. The payoff is deliberately too quick to be the point, because the point is the tension.

Then it’s on to the next song before you’ve even caught your breath. Except here’s what tells you somebody thought about the order of these songs: the next track is “8,” and it opens with about 72 seconds of quiet before it fully takes off. The album breathes for you. It knocks your wind out, and “8” gives it back. That’s a record thinking in album time, not just song time. Similar thing I was talking about with Spirit Assembly, in my last post, actually. Say your piece, trust people to keep up.

Now. I have to interrupt this discussion of SDRE and The Pink Album because after this record was released, a crime occurred, and I have to talk about it. Two crimes, in fact. Let me set it up properly. The rhythm section on this record is Nate Mendel on bass and William Goldsmith on drums, and they are extraordinary. One thing this album does is put on clear display what a strong rhythm section can do for a record and a band. I can point to every song. But go listen to “Rodeo Jones.” Or “Red Elephant.” Or “Waffle.” Or “Iscarabaid.” Listen to the way they get locked into one another and just drive the entire song on both melody and rhythm. It’s hard to do both, and yet they’re destroying. Nobody can listen to those songs, “Rodeo Jones” especially, and think these are background players. And, as we all know, Dave Grohl heard them and was like, they have to be in my new band, Foo Fighters. And so, they both join. Fantastic. Yes, of course. Greatness recognizing greatness. And then, the crimes occur, one quick and dirty. The second prolonged and ongoing. Goldsmith got taken out back and shot: he spent weeks recording the drums for The Colour and the Shape (Foo Fighters’ first album recorded as a full band) and Grohl went back and quietly re-recorded nearly all of them himself. Goldsmith found out secondhand. From Nate, as it happens. His name survives on a couple of tracks. He left, and who could blame him? That part’s well-documented. But Nate stayed, and this is where the second crime occurred and is still ongoing: Nate got muzzled. He’s being held hostage. Still there, decades now, playing competent arena rock root notes, while somewhere in him lives the guy who played “Rodeo Jones” or “Theo B.” Dave, come on. Don’t be threatened. I was lucky enough to have toured the festival circuits in Europe (and New Jersey) with Foo Fighters back with Boysetsfire some years back, and I fell for the Foo Fighters then: they’re great guys, and it’s great music. And still. Who can listen to “Rodeo Jones” and go, yeah, sound like that never again? Who can listen to The Pink Album, do the right thing by recruiting these guys for your band, and then erase one literally and the other metaphorically? Dave, you knew what you were getting. You can be the frontman and still have them shine. It may be too late for William, but not for Nate. Liberate Nate!

Ok. Back to the record…

I keep thinking about what The Pink Album does to you, and it’s this, it keeps handing you things you can’t keep. The gorgeous line that surfaces once and dissolves back. The build that crests and vanishes before your hand closes around it. The payoff at 4:09 that resolves and is instantly over. Even the words, half of them were never words at all, just sounds standing in for lyrics that never came. The drum fills that come and go, making each song. Everything on this record is fleeting on purpose. You just get to be there while it happens, and then it’s gone, and you put it on again. And the fact that this was written while the band was imploding and released after they called it quits, emphasizes this even more.

Which, if you read the first thing I ever posted here, might sound familiar. Music is the art you can’t hold. This album knows that about itself better than almost any record I own. It hands you the moment and takes it back in the same motion. Startling then. Perfect now. Perfect then too. I’m just glad I finally understood SDRE well enough in time before this album came out, so I could enjoy it for over three decades and counting.

That’s the second entry in my perfect punk album series. As a recap:

#1: Spirit Assembly’s Welcome to Lancaster County

#2: Sunny Day Real Estate’s s/t (aka The Pink Album)

#3: stay tuned…!

Album: Welcome to Lancaster County

Artist: Spirit Assembly

Label: Yuletide Records (1996)

Runtime: 8 songs, ~23 minutes

Ok. So this is the one I want to start with.

It was 1994 or 1995, and I was 14 or 15, the first time I saw Spirit Assembly. It was a room in Newark, Delaware, on a bill I’m pretty sure had Policy of Three on it. There was no stage. There almost never was. The three of them set up near one end, we stood a few feet off, and a song in, the gap between the band and the rest of us was just gone. I’d been going to shows for a few months by then. But it was already long enough to know I loved this. What it was doing to me, I wouldn’t figure out for years. Not sure if I ever have.

So, as a way to kickoff my “perfect punk album” series, I’m starting with one close to home: Welcome to Lancaster County by Spirit Assembly. Their only full-length, eight songs, clocking in at about 23 minutes, released in 1996 on Yuletide Records. You can’t stream it. It’s not on Spotify, Bandcamp, Apple Music, none of that. If you want to hear it you gotta check out a YouTube rip. Or, you can check Discogs and try to get the real thing. In part, this is why I wanted to start with this record. In an era when you can pull up almost any record ever made in about four seconds, this is one you have to know about and go find.

I should tell you first that I grew close to this band, because if I’m honest it’s all over everything I’m about to say. At that first show I bought their 7”, Old Joe the Eternal, and I saw them over a dozen times after. I played shows with them, booked shows for them, got to know them off the show floor, and the short version is they were solid guys. The kind you were lucky to have been a teenager around and come up in punk with. I remember Sam was a high school teacher and I was like damn, how lucky are those kids? What’s he like in class? Later, after Spirit Assembly was done, and after my own run of bands with my best friend Tim on drums was done as well, Tim formed Fields Lay Fallow with a couple of them. I was around for that at the start too, including in New York while they recorded. So, I’m not coming to this record cold. I never could. (And if I’m honest, I think that trip to NYC with them firmly planted my desire to move to NYC which I did in the summer of 1998. I remember sitting in Dojo’s on West 4th Street together and being like, wow, I need to be here…but I digress).

(a flyer for one of the shows I put on and played with Spirit Assembly)

There’s something else I have to talk about when it comes to music before I can write this. And it’s something that runs across anything I write here. A record is a time machine. You drop the needle, you press play, and it hands things back to you. It excavates. It pulls things, memories, feelings, ideas, out from somewhere within you. I don’t think we recognize it consciously at first, if at all sometimes, but it’s there. The first time you heard the song. The kid whose bedroom floor you were sitting on. The person who put it on a mixtape for you, especially if you had a crush on them. What you were going through at some point while listening to it. Any and all of that. I can’t put on Welcome to Lancaster County without some of that coming back: the inserts we read till we’d memorized them, the groove we wore down to nothing. Bringing it to my then-girlfriend’s house and playing it for our friends for the first time. The memories of hearing these songs live. Dru’s arms flailing around, Gus dancing and smiling, Sam yelling with urgency. For a long time I figured that was a problem for a series like this, all that personal weather fogging up the record. I don’t anymore. It’s just how anybody lives with music. Nobody hears anything from nowhere. And the record won’t sit still while you get older. It keeps coming back around. Something almost thirty years old can hand you a version of yourself you’d lost track of, then turn into a slightly different record the next time through, because you changed, and even if it didn’t, it seems like it must have. It’s not static. Even though an album is a particular recording of a particular moment, it’s a living art. You can generate a new relationship to a song, an album, than one from the past. It can anchor and invoke and it can evolve and generate. This one does all of that for me. It also flat-out stands on its own without any of my personal attachments. Both are true. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

(My letter from Steve who ran Yuletide accompanying the copy he sent me of the album)

So, as my first post in this series, let me explain what I mean by perfect. It doesn’t have to be the band’s best record. It doesn’t even have to hold their best song. Here’s the whole test: there’s not one track on it you’d skip. And this one holds up. Eight songs, every single one earns the spot. That bar is higher than it sounds, and streaming has half-trained the skill out of us, feeding us a song at a time until the album as a thing nearly disappeared. The apparent brevity with this one - 23 minutes - is the point too. The band says its piece and gets out. There’s an economy to it I came up believing in. You earn somebody’s time, then you give it back. It’s lightning in a bottle, or in this case, on vinyl.

First thing everybody notices about this record, (other than the kinda haunting sample of a kid talking about a blood draw that kicks the record off or once they get past not being able to even find the record) is that it sounds huge. And yet there are three people making it. You’d swear there were five or six of them crammed in the room. A lot of that is what happens when there’s only three of you and nobody gets to just hold down their one corner. The drums aren’t keeping time so much as articulating the album’s dynamism and urgency. The guitar covers an immense amount of ground on its own, swinging from discordant yet melodious riffs to thrashing chords. And the bass is pulling double duty, holding the floor down while it walks a melody over the top. And on top of that, the vocals criss-cross throughout. The vocals are used as instruments. They demand your attention and exhaust themselves in the process. That’s the engine of the album. Three people each playing like a person and a half, which is how a trio ends up sounding like a much bigger band. This fullness existed live and this record captures it.

I’ll try to show how they do this with two songs off the album. The first is “Continuity W/Out Question.” The song opens on a guitar chord riff, with the drums and bass punching accents alongside it. The chords sound like an air raid siren hitting in short bursts. The bass serves as the shelter. The drums are like the bombs hitting. Then it does what makes this record. It drops. Not into a quiet part, but into something cleaner, jangly, almost upbeat, the guitar left ringing. However, the notes sound almost wrong, and yet, are that way on purpose. Angular. Dissonant. They’re the kind of clustered, off-kilter voicing Monk would play on a piano.

What Spirit Assembly does so well and is captured here is that the loud part isn’t where the tension is. The clean part is. You hang on those ringing, sour notes like a rope pulled taut. Strip the distortion off and the unease climbs instead of easing, because now every wrong note is out in the open with nothing to hide behind. Vocals come through nearly breathless. It’s a break in the alert trying to get a message across to you before everything crashes again. Then the heaviness comes back and you’re launched. Swinging out on the line you were just gripping. And that’s the exact moment the double vocals hit as the chords slam back into distortion. They save the fullest, most kinetic vocal moment for the release, not the tension. The voices are the sound of letting go.

“Nameless” does this as well but through a different approach. It opens on bass chords, followed by hi hats, almost like a call and response. Then the guitar comes in with single notes picked out over the top, the pitch sitting a hair off true, and Dru lets loose on the drums. He plays them not quite setting the time but the melody. Which is already a strange, good inversion. It starts slow. It builds. And once it’s up to full speed it just stays there, the whole band moving in blocks, Gus swinging chords instead of picking out lines. Which is a lot of why three people fill a room like five. Nobody’s playing small.

Then, for me, there’s the move that makes the song, and it’s easy to miss if you’re only listening for volume. Everything stays loud and nothing pulls back. But the drums cut to half-time inside a single measure, the syncopation yanking the floor out from under a song that never actually slowed down. You don’t really hear that drop. You feel it. Live, it was the thing that threw my chest forward and back, the count lurching and my whole torso heaving with it, and the record still does it to me now, decades on, sitting down or walking or wherever I am. Late in the song a quiet part opens up, then the loud ending comes crashing back through. And it closes the way it started. On the bass, alone.

The double vocals on “Nameless,” screaming around each other the way I remember them live, add rhythmic push and color. The words are doing their own work too, braided into the music instead of laid on top. “Nameless” is personal and political at once, the way the best of this scene always was, and the subject is how often heterosexual men move through the world in constant sexualization of women. “I’ll disengage your wretched excuse for a man / it makes me so ill / the ultimate body? / why can’t you hear her mind? / not what her body supposedly says / your grip attempts to hold me down / but the struggle strives on in me / I’ll never let that die / I’ll take you down.”

These two tracks, to me, capture the album’s whole method. “Continuity” builds its tension out of harmony, the clean jangle and those Monk-like “wrong” chords, and the release is the swing back into distortion. “Nameless” builds its tension out of time, loud the entire way, the floor pulled out from under you by the drums alone. Same idea, chased down two different ways.

These dynamics - angular and dissonant guitar, melodious and thick bass, musical and textured drumming, urgent and breathless vocals and screams, composed in songs that swing from quiet, clean, and sometimes caressing like a whisper to surging, syncopated heavy sections - give this album its signature.

That’s what I mean about no skippable song. Every track here is good, sure. But more than that, the record keeps turning up a new way to do it.

The not-on-streaming thing gets stranger the more you trace the impact of the band. While they never got famous, they did something more lasting. You can draw a straight line to a ton of bands inspired out of this one trio. Spirit Assembly were quietly, hugely influential and almost completely uncredited, a band a lot of other bands came out of without ever saying so. So, part of what this post is, honestly, is just preservation.

I keep landing back in that room in Newark. The band on the floor, me at 14 or 15 with zero idea I’d still be turning this over thirty years later. That’s the time machine again. The record’s a way back to that kid, and it’s still teaching the older me, because every time I think I’ve finally got it pinned, it comes up new. So if any of this makes you want to hear it, good. You’re going to have to work for it a little. Ask somebody. Follow a link. Find it the slow way, the way we all used to find everything before it got handed to us, which was always part of how this music got under your skin in the first place. It made you come to it. So go find it. It’s worth the work.

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Nothing You Can Hold: An Introduction

This has been a long time coming. I have one of those small chat groups of long-time friends. For a couple years now they’ve been telling me I should write about music, and I’ve spent those same years not doing it. So with their nudging, and finally out of excuses, here it is.

I figure I should start by saying a little bit about who is writing. I’ve been inside music since I was 13, making it, setting it up, sharing it, listening to it, traveling on tour with it, and going to see it, mostly in the DIY punk scene. I played in a run of bands — Network 34, Eldritch Anisette, Midvale, Dorian Gray, Dear Tonight, Young Lady, and Boysetsfire — and from 1993 to 2012 I was putting shows on too, first in Newark, Delaware and then in New York City. For a long stretch, music wasn’t a hobby I had. It was most of the structure of my life.

Then it thinned out, the way these things do. Until last weekend, the last show I played was a 70,000-person festival in Germany in August 2012 with Boysetsfire (video of the set is actually online here). After that show, which was the last one on that tour, my brother, the drummer, quit/was kicked out, and I was told to choose him or the band. So, I quit. For a long time, I couldn’t go to a show. I couldn’t pick up my guitar or my bass. I didn’t want anything to do with it. To be honest, it was too painful. I kept listening (I never stopped listening) but I stopped making anything, and with the exception of a handful of shows, I stopped going for nearly a decade.

It all seemed like a former part of myself. A distant memory, of something I once knew, but that no longer had a relationship with. That me that was living with music, seemed like someone else. Then two things happened that really changed it all.

One happened about a year ago: Eldritch Anisette got reissued by Numero Group. We reconnected as a band, started playing together again, and I realized how much I missed creating music with people I love. There is a power in creating something deep from within myself, sharing that creation with other people, hearing their response and creation, and building something new as a collective. I’d been starving. I needed the grounding of a personal connection to music and the release of making it. And then seeing the thousands of younger people out there, responding to this music we made three decades ago and creating their own music, inspired me. It made me discover a part of myself I thought I lost.

Music is the strangest thing we make, and certainly one of the most unique art forms. You can’t hold it. It’s universal and yet it’s completely intangible, the one art with nothing to grab, existing only while it’s happening and then gone. It asks you to be there for it, present, now. Live, it does something even more remarkable: a room full of people agree to be present together, at the same moment, for something not one of them can keep. Your own experience meets everyone else’s, and for a few minutes you stop being only yourself; you’re part of some larger body that exists only because everyone showed up. The best word I have for that is one I’ll probably overuse around here: it’s a kind of magic.

This next part actually came first, before the band ever got back together. Three years ago I was in Portugal and wandered into a record store, and I was floored, not by punk, but by how much vast, living music I’d spent decades standing next to without ever really engaging. So many musical subgenres from around the world. Whole worlds of it, from everywhere, and a great deal of jazz. Jazz wasn’t new to me. At 15, right around when I started Network 34, I’d been discovering Coltrane alongside punk with my best friend Tim Nichols, the drummer for Network and Eldritch, who used to sit in at a jazz club near us. It was amazing watching this 15 year old kid stun the old timers in the jazz club. Portugal woke that back up. I came home and decided to actually learn the music this time, not dabble, learn it. Not just dip my toes but jump in head first. Over the next couple years, I took more than ten classes at Jazz at Lincoln Center, went to every concert I could, worked through documentaries, read more than twenty books, and bought over a hundred records.

The part that got me most excited about it is that I did it with the algorithm switched off. No “you might also like.” I found everything the old way. It was through word of mouth, liner notes, names dropped in the footnotes of books, and by walking into stores and asking what I should hear next. Incidentally, this still can be one of the great conversations we can have. It mirrored closely with how I found punk in the first place, back before any of us were online. It was slow, personal, a little effortful, and therefore yours. Discovering the music was inseparable from discovering myself, the same as it had been as a teenager.

I went deepest into the jazz of the 1960s and ‘70s, the spiritual and free end of it. John Coltrane, Don Cherry, Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, Archie Shepp, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. And the deeper I got, the more I kept hearing things I already knew from somewhere else. I’m going to save this for future pieces because it needs more room, but the the shape of it to come is that this music and the punk I came up in more closely resonate than what has been acknolwedged. There’s a lot more coming on that.

All of this arrived right when I needed it. Work was hard, life was throwing a few things at me, my stress was high and my bearings were off, and going this deep into music, old and new, mine and everyone else’s, put my feet back on the ground. It reminded me there was more to the picture than the part that was wearing me down, and that I need music in my life the way I need the short list of other things I don’t bother questioning. This blog is my attempt to hold onto that, and keep showing up for it.

So, here’s what I hope to do with For Want Of. Some of it will be me thinking out loud about music and the metaphysical, because that’s where my head tends to go. A lot of it will be a series I’ve wanted to write for years: perfect punk albums. I mean “punk” as broadly as I always have, hardcore, emo, screamo, punk rock, etc. It was always only “punk” to me. The subgenres always seemed like an imposition from somewhere else. And I mean “perfect” in a sense that streaming has just about trained out of us. In an era built to hand us one smooth, disposable song at a time, I’ve spent the past year going back to albums, front to back, and a few of them stopped me cold. Not because they’re necessarily the band’s best, or hold the band’s best song, but because there’s no skippable track anywhere on them. Every song earns its place. That’s the standard, no skippable song. It’s actually rarer than it sounds.

And lastly, jazz. I want to discuss that era (late ‘50s-’70s), those scenes, the music theory, the politics, and its parallel to the DIY punk underground I keep circling back to. If I’m lucky, I’ll even get to sit down with a few of the people who were actually there.

That’s the plan. Thanks for being here for the first one, it only took a few years and a few patient friends to get me to start. The next one won’t take nearly as long.