#you know its going good when youre relating to emo music from new jersey | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thursday-band · 6 years

Link

A little Thursday throwback interview w/ Steve & Tom! Coming from 2003, and ahead of the release of, 'War All the Time,' and an upcoming show in Chicago. For all of you lovely creatures following.. enjoy! The article's complete text is below: "Keep Thursday in Mind" September 19, 2003 BY JIM DeROGATIS POP MUSIC CRITIC Forget about "The Rising." On its brilliant third album and eagerly-anticipated major-label debut, New Jersey's Thursday has created one of the smartest and most moving surveys of life after the attack on America, all without ever once directly mentioning 9/11. Images of life in the trenches permeate "War All the Time," but unlike their neighbor Bruce Springsteen, vocalist Geoff Rickly, guitarists Steve Pedulla and Tom Keeley, bassist Tim Payne and drummer Tucker Rule don't milk recent events for cheap Hallmark-card sentimentality, nor do they make the mistake of some pedantic punks who strive to tell us "what it all means." THURSDAY, DEATH BY STEREO, YEAR OF THE RABBIT *7 p.m. Saturday *House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn (Chicago) *Tickets, $15 *(312) 923-2000 One of the leading proponents of a burgeoning underground scene that some have dubbed "screamo" (for mixing the literate, poetic lyrics of emo punk with a harsher and more metallic brand of sonic thrash), the New Brunswick quintet first broached the mainstream with "Understanding In A Car Crash," the hit single from 2001's "Full Collapse." New songs such as "Between Rupture and Rapture," "For the Workforce, Drowning" and "Marches and Maneuvers" are even stronger, portraying life as a complicated series of draining battles -- from relations with other countries, to connections with friends and lovers, to the conflicts that rage within ourselves. I spoke with Pedulla and Keeley (whose serpentine guitars often blur the lines between lead and rhythm) as the band was gearing up for a tour that brings it to the House of Blues on Saturday night. Q. You were coming off an impressive hit on MTV2 and modern-rock radio and recording your first major-label album for Island. Was there a lot of pressure in the studio this time around? Pedulla: We went through a lot making this one, that's for sure, but most of it was pressure we put on ourselves. We basically toured for almost two years on "Full Collapse," and we got home from the fall tour, took three days off, and then wrote and went right into the studio. So it was like pretty much nonstop, no breaks. By the end of recording this record, we were all pretty fried. But sometimes that kind of thing helps out: It makes you think a little bit less and play a little more. Keeley: For all the time that we had in the studio, there were some crucial points where we were definitely rushed to the point where it detracted from the creative process. There were these weird deadlines. That actually was the one pressure that we did feel that we wouldn't have really felt before. But I think as much as it detracted from the process, it helped the overall feeling of the record. It's important to capture some kind of tension, especially in our music. A lot of our music is about tension and release, and I guess it makes perfect sense to have it kind of exist throughout the rest of our lives, and not just on record. Q. Though you never specifically mention 9/11, those events and the mood in New York in their aftermath permeate this disc. Were they on your mind as you were recording? Pedulla: Definitely. We were actually home when that happened. Obviously, being so close, it's overwhelming, and seeing it on TV, the thing that was so weird is we could see the smoke from our houses. I remember a couple of days after, we were like, "OK, let's try to get our minds off this and go to a show," and we went to see our friends play in Hoboken at Maxwell's, forgetting that that was going to be right there. We pulled up to park and it was like the smoke was still billowing out right across the Hudson River. There was no escaping it. The parallel with "War All the Time" is we were just talking about how you see all this stuff on TV and it makes you think that it's not real, and you kind of forget that what it comes down to is a very personal thing and there are real people involved. That's part of it. I guess the thing is, we're not trying to make some political statement. We're not like a political band trying to make some big comment on 9/11 or the war in Iraq, but definitely that stuff influenced us, and it was in and around the time we started writing, so that kind of stuff was going to come out. Q. In many corners, rock is now viewed as mere entertainment. That's never been the case in the punk underground. Do you think music still has the power to affect a generation--your twentysomething peers--the way that it did your parents in the '60s? Keeley: I think it's inevitable that it will matter again at some point. It seems that's the cycle of music--that it matters for a while, and then it gets co-opted and mass-produced, and then times are fine again and people want to hear happy music and they don't want to think. That seems to be the trend, where people need to turn off. And then it turns around again. Honestly, as far as we're concerned, even before everything went down with 9/11, we all just set out to write music that mattered to us and that wasn't contrived in any way. We just wanted to see how it would work. We weren't setting out to write a catchy chorus or any of that stuff. We just wanted to make music and do it in a serious way. And I'd say that if people are listening to us now post-9/11 and they're looking for something that is serious, we're not the only serious band. Pedulla: I'm actually a little scared about [how the album will be received]. In the '60s or '70s, people weren't as afraid; all kinds of musicians would talk out against the war. But for some reason, now the Dixie Chicks make a comment and they're put up on a cross. Eddie Vedder does a little comment on stage about Bush and everybody freaks out at him. No one wants to hear anymore, and I think that's the problem. Probably because of the nature of the way these events unfolded, people's mind-sets are a little bit different, but what's unfortunate is they're not open to listening to the other side. The way we feel about it is like Geoff will say on stage: "It's not our job to get up here and tell you what to think about the war or what's going on in the world right now, we just want you to remember that these are real people, they're just like you and me, and don't forget that." I was actually kind of surprised in a way at how many people were pro-war or pro all of these events that were going on. I couldn't believe it. I thought some of the people would be more angry about what was going on and not just accept that, "Oh yeah, that's the right thing to do." To me, it's not even so much that they're pro-war, it just doesn't seem like they're questioning, and I would hope that they'd be questioning whether or not this is a good idea. Q. So the goal with "War All the Time" was to make your fans think? Pedulla: I would hope that it could get people to think a little bit. If we're going to make mindless music, then I don't know why we're doing it. There's nothing wrong with pop music that doesn't say anything, but that's just not what we would want to do.

17 notes · View notes

recommendedlisten · 6 years

Text

In certain parts of the country, it may be tough to think spring when you’re still shoveling your way out of a nor’easter on a weekly basis, but the season is officially here, which means it’s time to catch up with what Recommended Listen dug since our last quarterly list. Not every listen that has left an impression gets a formal review due to time constraints, or as in the case of 2018′s first few months, the fact that there seems to be way too much good music coming out these days. That’s not necessary a curse, but it can make for some bouts of content overload that make it impossible to keep up with. If you’re looking to meet your new favorite band, the last few months were a good time to find them as well. Here’s 10 excellent albums to rock while spring cleaning out your emotions in case you missed them the first time around.

American Nightmare - American Nightmare [Rise Records]

At the start of this decade, Wes Eisold had seemingly outgrown his hardcore roots and remade himself a dark pop fashionista with his synth-pop band Cold Cave. After all, putting his band American Nightmare to bed followed a tumultuous chapter in his life that involved renaming the band twice-over for legal matters atop of a wavering scene that sucked much of the the energy out of the project. 2012′s reunion of the band was a timely reaction to a deserved reappraisal from listeners and critics alike, however, with a rekindled interest in AN’s brutalist sound being long overdue. The band’s self-titled comeback and first new music in 15 years lives up to that legacy, while adding new chapters to it as well. Here, Eisold and company furnish their artillery with wiry post-punk and a metalcore exoskeleton that gives a glimpse into what once was while showing what American Nightmare, and hardcore as a whole, have become during these years of silence. If anything, they’re still deafening, screaming new anthems of survival into the void.

awakebutstillinbed - what people call low self-esteem is really just seeing yourself the way that other people see you [Tiny Engines]

It’s one thing to channel your emotions into your work, but Shannon Tyler lets hers entirely consume her every being throughout the public confessionals behind awakebutstillinbed’s blistering debut what people call low self-esteem is really just seeing yourself the way that other people see you. The breakout release from the San Jose basement punk project found a cult following early on in the year under its own self-released merits, but its spectacular energy has managed to get the band signed properly to Tiny Engines for an upcoming wider release, and it’s easy to hear why. These are songs that made their way straight from Tayor’s diary into the microphone as her signature sing-scream bravely bleeds out insecurities and earnest frustrations in the kind of way that makes for highly digestible lyrical fodder for anyone banging their brain against the headboard. Whether it;s an introverted meditation or cathartic outburst, awakebutstillinbed knows exactly how to find a safe space for them inside of capsules as faceted as twinkly indie rock and post-hardcore where they’re allowed to exist as they are.

Camp Cope - How to Socialise & Make Friends [Run for Cover Records]

As a dude, speaking to Camp Cope’s How to Socialise & Make Friends is a daunting task, because anyone of the XY chromosome probably isn’t the most qualified to do the kind of heavy lifting the Melbourne indie rockers’ do here on their sophomore effort. The listen protests and shouts just as much as it lets out heavy sighs as singer Georgia Maq airs her grievances, be it via acid tongue or a higher road empathy, on gendered double-standards and her exhaustion with cultured misogyny in every facet of her daily life, from being an all-women band in a male-dominated punk scene to dealing with guys behaving badly in and out of her circle. Camp Cope’s sound matches both an anti-authoritarian DIY spirit and emotive frustration equivocally, as Maq’s unspooling of guitars over Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich and Sarah Thompson’s steady rhythm clears a path for her to break the patriarchy, if even by throwing just one stone at it at a time.

Corey Flood - Wish You Hadn’t EP [Fire Talk Records]

Wintertime is known to deplete the body of mood-boosting vitamin D, and Wish You Hadn’t, the debut EP from Philadelphia anxiety punks Corey Flood, may as well be the sonic antidote to transition you from any lingering seasonal affective disorder you may be experiencing as you blinker your eyes back into the sunlight with caution. Their style of rock is rife with a dreamy malaise that sleeps well in bed with the ‘90s gloom pop soft siren sounds of Liz Phair and PJ Harvey, with frontwoman Ivy Gray Klein spinning in her own head where confusion is sex, the self, or some mixture of both. Unlike the other examples of darker dalliances of indie rock found on this list, Wish You Hadn’t moves with a slow current of thought where Klein’s words slink over Noah Jacobson-Carroll and Em Boltz’ guitars and keep in sync with the rhythm she and drummer Juliette Rando make. Her existentialist decrees stream in through tributaries rather than a flood rush, because after all, the dark thoughts that last are usually the ones you let fester over time.

Gulfer - Dog Bless [Topshelf Records]

“I’m not going out / I’m staying right here in my basement / I’m just gonna chill / And later write a song about it,” screeches Gulfer frontman Vincent Ford on the quartet’s Topshelf breakout Dog Bless. It’s a resounding statement, not just because his voice scrapes against the board like nails grating cement, but in the way it paints a pretty accurate portrait for the listen that never grows tired from start to end, in spite of Ford’s admissions of grown up exhaustion. Themes on adult malaise are evergreens in relatability in the emo scene no matter who you’re springing those choruses unto, yet Gulfer muster up more than enough energy up in those admissions without overthinking the medium through which they push it through that makes their unkempt take on math rock sound sincerely raw. There have been many, many bands before them who’ve shouted these daily anxieties out in small spaces just like theirs, but all that really matters is that it’s done in earnest. If better weather isn’t really your think, here’s a dozen tracks about preferring the basement to anywhere else.

Hurry - Every Little Thought [Lame-O Records]

Every Little Thought, the third studio effort from emotive guitar-pop rockers Hurry, was released in February but its arrival could be considered premature bloom, as the listen feels closer to singing the songs of springtime romance than winter’s chill. So much of the Philly trio’s sound is indebted to conjuring warm sunshine (if even faded...) and a fresh breeze, yet not so much in the same sense as the surf-sided indie rock out there. Rather, Hurry glistens closer to home in big hooks and an FM alternative sparkle as frontman Matt Scottoline’s choruses glide through the air with little resistance, as his riffs alongside the mid-tempo melancholia made by bassist Joe DeCarolis and drummer Rob DeCaroli carry the weight of that wistfulness in well-preserved memory held together by a bittersweet saccharine of fuzzy emo riffs and pristine power pop. Even if your spring fling goes by the wayside, hopefully Hurry will remind you of the parts of its passing worth keeping.

Russian Baths - Penance EP [Good Eye Records]

Russian Baths may be one of many new bands on the endless post-punk supply chain, yet the differentiating that sets them apart from the rest of that discordant abyss resides in how the quartet have recontextualized that spectrum beyond the surface level with their debut EP Penance. The four-track listen makes the most of an intriguing experiment in short order by exploring various faces of bleakness under the helm of shared vocal vessels Luke Koz and Jess Rees, with the former often anchoring aggression at a loss of control while the latter reigns in a dreamy stasis. When the two cross paths, it conjures a black matter made from angular riffs cutting through subcutaneous layers of shoegaze, hardcore and metal. Penance’s themes often highlight an evil unknowingly lurking in the everyman, and it’s only when Russian Baths tear into that skin where true darkness is revealed.

Shamir - Resolution [Self-released]

Ever since he ditched the savior of house pop label he never asked for last year, Shamir has been on a creative tear with his new found songwriting independence, which is to say the music we’re hearing is fully and wholly an outpouring of himself rediscovering who he always was behind the studio gloss. Going through some shit has added a healthy layer of dirt the process, with last year’s doubling of HOPE and Revelations being a lo-fi meditative catharsis, but with his latest surprise release Resolution, not only is the hiss amplified, but it shows us a side of the young genre non-conformist we’ve yet to meet where he’s brandishing how sharp his teeth (and songwriting) can be as well. Bookended by politics and filled with a breakup post-mortem in between, there’s enough for Shamir to seethe on through reverb-heavy post-punk slathered in goth eyeliner and the occasional country strummer to make these woes as sad and angry as he wants. They say to think things through before you react, but so far, going with instinct is serving Shamir v.2.0 well.

Sidney Gish - No Dogs Allowed [Self-released]

No Dogs Allowed, the debut album from Boston-by-way-of-Jersey songwriter Sidney Gish, arrived with a quiet bang that we don’t really get to experience too often these days with artists on the rise. She self-released the effort with hardly a publicity push behind it aside from word-of-mouth buzz, and it all happens to be well-warranted if your lane for melancholic indie pop is a timeless formula molded around a modernist perspective where clean guitar hooks and smart, hyper-specific storytelling run parallel through the satirical gaze of a 20something on a collision course with reality. That Gish initially dropped No Dogs Allowed at the very start of the new year seems like a little quip of irony in itself -- She delivers hers in song with a perked up posture that strolls into springtime better than it might in the wintry blast it initially arrived. Rethinking the conventional is kind of her thing, though...

Teenage Wrist - Chrome Neon Jesus [Epitaph Records]

Teenage Wrist sound quite literally like what their name suggests – A trio of rather young artists getting their grip around their musical identities while figuring out all of the other hard realities of life that follow one’s coming of age. For a debut album on one of the biggest punk labels out there, Chrome Neon Jesus makes more sense out of all of that than it deserves to this early on in their career, as bassist and frontman Kamtin Mohager, guitarist Marshall Gallagher and drummer Anthony Salazar meld together brooding influences of punk, shoegaze and arena-ambitious ‘90s alternative with such cohesion that it makes for one of the year’s best rock albums so far. That the effort was produced by studio pro Carlos De La Garza (Paramore, Jimmy Eat World) reinforces that their big sound covers the walls from end to end, and by filtering it through layers of beauty and existential terror, the Los Angeles trio have captured a moment that resonates perfectly with a new generation.

#lists #american nightmare #awakebutstillinbed #camp cope #corey flood #gulfer #hurry #russian baths #shamir #sidney gish #teenage wrist #features

2 notes · View notes

drewkatchen · 7 years

Photo

Twenty years ago it wasn’t novel to have a really specific opinion about Jawbreaker, the little three-piece punk rock band that everyone personally owned until they no longer did. It was all glowing praise, outrage over their calculations and callous indifference toward your thoughts of their career ambition or anywhere else on the spectrum, and most people fiddled with their bangs or barrettes while telling you this stuff over a bean burrito. 2017 is no different. I’m guessing that anyone from say college age to wizened old forty-something, maybe with a tattoo or several, bike owner and drinks shitty beer through a chipped tooth whether because of financial restraints or for posturing, you have likely given a piece of your mind to someone within earshot about the state of reunions and where you fall on Jawbreaker returning to a stage. Maybe it was to the Internet or to your wife or your husband or your kid, and maybe they know what you’re talking about or maybe they just think you should feed the cat. At forty, it could be gauche or off-putting to have opinions about old bands because maybe it makes you seem out of touch, and rightly maybe you’ve moved on to talk about the evils of gentrification and new construction or neighborhoods with good schools, but Jawbreaker is still something else entirely and you will share what you think.

Maybe you’re really happy because, like me, you spent the better part of the nineties in remote corners of the country, unable to find a ride to the show a hundred miles away on a school night, and you missed the chance to dance up against your buds in your Dickies to ‘Shield Your Eyes.’ And you think about how life conspired against you. Maybe having ample chances to see Jets to Brazil just left you a bit cold, like observing someone in the wrong relationship or what from the outside seemed like the wrong relationship. Or maybe, in the reunion-saturated circus that is now (are we living on a planet with more reunited acts than new acts?) you’d hoped that they would be the one group of individuals who just wouldn’t sully the enduring image you had of them, whatever your enduring image is. The acrimony that seemed present at their dissolution, certainly you could rest assured these were the guys that wouldn’t be tempted. You may also not care, but then again, if you don’t care about the band, then you’re probably not reading this either. But it doesn’t matter because my opinion isn’t as strong as that damn mighty group, still fortified all these years later with the power to beguile, that first popped up again for me last month on Chrissy Piper’s Instagram feed, her announcing to the world again something was happening when singer Blake Schwarzenbach, a totem of some kind of endurance, was leaning against a tree and having a smoke before a secret show, a post that absolutely took my breath away.

And my opinion about them coming back to life may not matter, but I have one and so do some of my friends, and they’ve been through zits and bad bands and lack of sex and then sex and then edge-breaking and then shit jobs and then good jobs and then weddings and kids with this band. We’ve grown, moved laterally, dipped and emerged with Blake, Adam and Chris. They don’t know us and we don’t know them, but we know them and we know ourselves in relation to what they’ve created. And I wanted to hear what my friends had to say because they’re funny and insightful and this stuff got to them all when their cement was still wet and for better or worse is in them for good.

But I’ll go first.

Jawbreaker were a band above most others, as far as I was concerned. From a distinct community of musicians that went on to have a global footprint, but best I could tell they were their own scene. This wasn’t my friend’s band; they weren’t kids from the high school even though they knew the kids from the high school started bands to sound like them. Accessible but also off-kilter, lyrics that used a bunch of common words to tell heartbreaking and affirming stories of love and house parties and untapped potential. They were the band my straight edge friends and emo friends and skater friends and pop punk friends could all agree on. There was a universality to their narratives that could speak to you if you let them. What was their party affiliation anyway? Beer? Books? Trains? Sadness? Effortlessly them and if you wanted to find yourself in their lyrics then you could.

I can see myself, a doughy Catholic high school teen in 1993, in different rooms and in the cars of different friends. My mom couldn’t stand Frankie and his dyed hair, but he opened up my world when he lent me the Chesterfield King record, the cover evocative in what it showed and in what it hid. I gripped it tight before putting it on my crummy turntable, allowing the titular song to really warm my ears. Who was the singer in the cool pants? Why was his face hidden? Why was he playing his guitar that way? Who was on the back cover? Were they in the band?

To me (and as it turned out, thousands of others), the song sounded like love. A love that I had never experienced and love I may never realize. Sweet, wooly, woozy love, and listening to it on my bedroom stereo, I imagined what it would be like to be held. The singer's rasp, appealingly like shredded glass and smoke, somehow sounded like romance or aching. Did I understand the lineage working? Did I know of Westerberg and Mould and Richard Butler? Maybe, but no, not really and it didn’t matter. As a teen, Blake Schwarzenbach was my Westerberg. I’d found succor in the pointed frustrations of Ian MacKaye and Ray Cappo, but what I most wanted was a boyfriend, to have someone there to buffer the family chaos tornadoing around me and to play with my hair. I didn’t have that but I imagined being the love interest in this singer's world. Did I notice then he used a pronoun only once or twice unless he was describing the ‘toothless woman’, a tableau affording me the chance to picture two men together on a couch, tracing lines on palms and clinging together in outerwear. The words in the song painted an image of proximity: of a protagonist close enough to, however odd, smell his love's thoughts. It sounded like heaven; it made me feel warm. This was my introduction to Jawbreaker. ‘Chesterfield King’ was a song I first experienced alone in Goose Creek, South Carolina, and it followed me all the way to this year, where it still sounded like love when it played during my wedding reception in a cozy bar on a winter day in Jersey City, New Jersey.

---

As far as them being a band now, I don’t begrudge anyone trying to make money and keep their lives afloat or even just being together with their friends. These guys were talented enough to write and record winning lottery tickets they could cash in decades down the road and now they are smart enough to take it. Good for them. Maybe I was concerned about my own relationship with the band in the current moment. Did I even have one? Did I need to? Aside from putting on their records at home or on my phone for the morning commute, how much did I really care anymore? How much did I need to care? I no longer sit and worry about things like relationships and affection when my legs are on my husband's lap, the TV or turntable on near us. That they have sounded good at every show they have played this year is great and it's inspiring to see their determination to make it sail. That they are around in 2017, existing in the face of nuclear nonsense and terrifying natural disasters, calms my jitters just that much. So I thank them for that as well. I didn’t travel to Chicago because my husband and I are saving our pennies for a home but just know that Jawbreaker breathed life--real, concrete life--into my half-lived youth and helped me understand my heart a little bit better, and I owe them a real debt of gratitude for it. And if, as Schwarzenbach says, there’s a 95 percent chance of a show in New York City, then consider me camped out for it already.

But I think I speak for everyone when I say this: no new music, guys.

And now my friends:

Tommy, in his early-forties, college professor

“Trying to Take Its Form”

Most of us remember when we heard that Jawbreaker had broken up. It followed soon after the release of Dear You [Jawbreaker’s final album, released in September 1996], or the moment when most of us felt Jawbreaker had broken up with us. In hindsight, the punk underground’s bitter rejection of Jawbreaker and Dear You seems petty and self-righteous at worst, naïve at best. On one hand, we might see the subsequent redemption of Dear You and Jawbreaker’s long afterlife as a confirmation of all of that. On the other hand, we might also recognize the profound, almost inexplicable, attachment people must have had to a band to feel so spurned by their career decisions and to cherish them so many years after they were gone. That kind of attachment is what comes to mind when I think of the many, many hours I spent with Jawbreaker after I discovered them in 1992. My first encounter was through a friend whose older brother had an enviable record collection. He had been in the right places in the late 1980s and early 1990s to acquire some absolute gems. His record crates held first pressings of Jawbreaker, Jawbox, Fugazi, Samiam, and virtually every New York hardcore LP and compilation. From those crates I randomly drew the New Red Archive’s Hardcore Breakout USA Volume 1 double LP. The second song on the first side is Jawbreaker’s “Rich,” which I am guessing by the date and sound was recorded during the same session as Unfun [Jawbreaker’s debut record, released in 1990]. The guitar tone, Blake’s scratchy, but melodic vocals, and the relentless drums made me think the Lookout Records pop punk I had feasted on for a good year was suddenly outdated.

“Rich” slots in neatly with other material from Unfun; it doesn’t aspire to the experimentation or darkness of Bivouac nor does it exhibit the stripped-down pop and lyrical mastery of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy [Jawbreaker’s third album, released in 1994]. It is a minor song, minor enough not to make an LP that few would claim as the band’s masterpiece. But man, did that fucking song cut its way into me; it sunk into the surface of my skin and gave me goosebumps. I never, ever wanted to listen to it in the company of other people. Jawbreaker became that intensely personal band, one you use as a measurement of other people, but don’t want to share with anyone else.

I was a 16-year-old punk kid in small town South Carolina when I found that song. Climbing into manhood was usually signaled by sexual conquests (my score card was comfortably and securely at zero), athletic prowess (flamed out in little league), or outdoor activities that involved shooting animals before arriving at school. Guns seemed weird and I hated the “hunt before homeroom” kids enough that I never wanted to be identified with them. Punk offered some refuge from those models of masculinity and their suite of expectations. I learned pretty swiftly how to say “Fuck you” to most of those people. But crawling out from under those pressures didn’t lead to much else. You could, it turned out, be righteous in your refusal of everything and still alienated. Like other people in my small punk circle, I dreamed of getting out, of fleeing to neighboring Columbia, a town which seemed by comparison metropolitan, diverse, culture rich, and home to a vibrant punk and hardcore scene.

Enter Jawbreaker’s “Rich.” I don’t know the story behind this song or what compelled Blake to write it. I do know that I heard it as a fucking promise:

“A Dream rising. Trying to take its form against the norm. A goal, hard to hold. Sizing up itself against the world. Don’t push, it’ll come. Everything is gonna be alright. Steady now, don’t fall apart. Keep yourself upright.”

No one ever said any of that to me when I was a struggling teenager. They didn’t say it because I never relayed how much I hated going to school or how much I hated everyone there or how hopelessly narrow my future prospects seemed. I wanted something else, somewhere else, but had no reason to think I deserved more. Black Flag and Minor Threat had taught me how to internalize music. I could close the door to my room and make those voices screaming on the other end of my headphones scream for me and scream with me. It was a survival strategy. Jawbreaker’s “Rich” spoke to me immediately and intimately. It was okay to want more, to have outsized dreams, and even to feel crushed by the weight of them. “Everything is gonna be alright.” It is the simplest of lines; it could also be among the most trite and cliché. Those words would have been meaningless if anyone else had ever uttered them to me. But from Jawbreaker, they felt honest and shockingly new. The rising of Blake’s voice at the onset of that line signaled confidence, understanding, and, fuck it, I’ll say it, love. I spent hours alone listening to that song over and over.

Several months later I was punished for standard teenage punk antics: not coming home on time (or not at all in this case), getting blind drunk with friends in the woods, and driving 70 miles to Myrtle Beach at 4 in the morning because it seemed like only thing left to do. Housebound and on restriction for weeks, I took those Hardcore Breakout and Unfun records into my room and lived with them for days on end. At some point, I was allowed a trip to Manifest Records (southeastern record store chain) and the cashier handed me an advanced copy of Jawbreaker’s Bivouac on cassette. I was obsessed. That month’s issue of Maximum Rocknroll contained an ad announcing Jawbreaker’s summer tour and Columbia, SC was on the itinerary. I was granted early release due to good behavior just in time for that show and it was everything I needed it to be.

If you were a teenager when Jawbreaker started releasing records, there is a very good chance that you grew up with the band. Blake’s lyrics and storytelling became increasingly complex and mature; the direct appeal of “everything’s gonna be alright” blossomed into narratives of entangled love, unshakeable regret, and the pull of places near and far. In other words, teenage angst evolved into the intense emotional swings of early adulthood. And somehow, for me anyway, those first three albums never lost their power to give form to experience. They still haven’t lost that power.

If so many of us were furious when Jawbreaker “sold out,” it was because they taught us how to feel our way through worlds that didn’t want us to feel; they told us we could leave places that didn’t want us to escape. We could hold out for a little longer because it would be worth it.

Todd, late thirties, works with computers, lives in Washington, my former roommate

I came across Jawbreaker in the spring of 1995 while doing a radio show at WRUV in Burlington, VT my junior year of high school. My friend Mike called in and wanted me to play “Ashtray Monument,” [a song from he 1994 album 24 Hour Revenge Therapy] so I played it and fell in love with the song, so I "borrowed" the CD from the radio station for the next week and listened to it pretty much non-stop. The latter-half of that album in particular became the soundtrack to the end of my high school life; I would listen to Do You Still Hate Me? and West Bay Invitational over and over again obsessing over the heartbreak and joy found within each song, but it wasn't until 1996 when I bought a copy of Bivouac that I really got into them. Bivouac always felt like a very odd album to me. There's still such a contrast between the first three songs on that record (”Shield Your Eyes”, “Big” and “Chesterfield King”) compared to the rest of the album -- those songs are light and poppy compared to the density of most of the later tracks (although "You Don't Know What You've Got" and "Pack it Up" break that mold.) I was super into Orange Rhyming Dictionary [an abum by Jets to Brazil, a band that formed after Jawbreaker with Blake Schwarzenbach as singer], but quickly was disappointed by Jets to Brazil. Four Cornered Night killed me with that "I love my piano" song, and while Perfecting Loneliness was much more decent, it never could capture that frenzied energy that Jawbreaker managed to contain. I remember getting a copy of a live show of their's at Mad Hatters on VHS from Rick Ta Life [singer of New York Hardcore band 25 ta Life] off eBay when I lived with you in Boston, and the camera operator is standing on Chris' [Bauermeister, Jawbreaker bassist] side of the stage so the recording is insanely bass-heavy. They rip into “P.S. New York is Burning” and for the first time I really heard what was going on in with the bass line in that song. This was right after 9/11, so there was some poignancy to the song title at the time as well, but it just felt heavy and cathartic at the same time. “Parabola” and the eponymous Bivouac follow that line as well; they're songs of release.

This was also the time when I realized that what made Jawbreaker so amazing wasn't just Blake's lyrics or guitar or Adam's drumming or Chris' bass, but rather the interplay of all of them together and how they worked off each other to create something new. I never got the chance to see them -- they broke up way too quickly after I discovered them and never played anywhere close enough to Burlington to be able to catch them live.

Vincent, Has a really adorable daughter, lives in North Carolina with his awesome wife, wrote for HeartattaCk, has a nice voice

How did I find Jawbreaker? Memories attached to them? Did I see them? What do I really think about JTB? What song of theirs really meant something to me? What do I think of the reunion?

"The Boat Dreams from the Hill" reminds me of a late-80s maroon Volvo. I was in a classmate's car when I heard it, and the rest of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy for the first time. Most memorably, I remember every passenger in that tank belting the chorus to "Boxcar," ("1-2-3-4 / Who's punk / What's the score?") while trucking around Hillsborough Street.

That weekend, I went down to Schoolkid's Records and picked out 24-Hour Revenge Therapy and Farside's Rigged. I brought both to the clerk, and asked which one was better. He admitted to knowing nothing about Farside, but took one look at the Revelation Records logo and said, "Do you like heavy stuff? This one is gonna be heavy." He held up the Jawbreaker and said, "I can definitely tell you that this album's great." And, boy, it was. (I got Farside's 'Rigged' a few weeks later, and that, too, was also great, but definitely not heavy).

While most retrospectives stake out Jawbreaker as a monument to emo, in their zeitgeist they were lumped in with pop punk and the East Bay scene. Where pop punk stayed within the confines of a three-chord, verse-chorus-verse formula, Jawbreaker veered into extended instrumental jams, moody, white noise textures, and irreverent samples. Where pop punk's attitude was basic and bratty, Jawbreaker's demeanor was literary and melancholy. They appealed to kids that matured from fart jokes to irony. Like J. D. Salinger, I think Jawbreaker speaks to post-pubescent angst really well. In particular, hyper-sensitive and brooding young males like myself. We're a lot of fun at parties.

I saw Jawbreaker on November 2, 1995 at the Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, North Carolina. The openers were The Smoking Popes and Eagle Bravo. If a kid were born on that day, they could legally drink now. Whoa. This show was notable for a number of reasons: 1. Like most ambitious punks, I did a zine at the time. I reached out to Jawbreaker's publicist at Geffen Records, thinking they were too big for some 15-year old kid with a zine that had a circulation of about 500 copies. Nope. Geffen was cool, set me up with a couple of hours with the band before the show, and put me and a friend on the guest list.

2. Since it was for my zine, I took photos. I had just gotten a fully manual SLR from an uncle and taken a photography class here and there, but definitely had no idea what I was doing. I shot black and white and developed the photos in the hallway bathroom. They didn't come out great, but it started a long tradition of photographing live music that I still partake in today. 3. My +1 couldn't make it, as he fell ill on the day of. It was something pretty serious, as Jawbreaker was one of his favorite bands. I got him a Get Well Soon card and had the band sign it. I remember that Blake wrote "Be well soon," to which I thought he was real learned and shit.

I followed the hype around Jets to Brazil enough to pick up Orange Rhyming Dictionary, and saw them a couple of times. They never grabbed me in the way Jawbreaker did, and I'm already bored writing this sentence, so that'll be that. [Editor’s note: So shady, Vincent].

There's only a couple of bands from my impressionable and developmental days that aged with me, and Jawbreaker was one of them. In the way that a song might have meant something to me at 16 years old, but take on a totally different meaning when I was 25. "Donatello" off Bivouac was like that. Over the years, I related to various interpretations: my relationship with my parents, living in suburban North Carolina, racial expectations, but it was never a love song to me. One random memory: there was a period in my life where I started making "normal" friends, stepping outside of the murky underground music scenes, and navigating parts of Chicago I had initially avoided. I ended up falling in love with a lady, who is now my wife. She threw a party once, and, for music, just plugged in her iPod and hit random. "Kiss the Bottle" was on there, a track from a mix CD a college friend had made her. While everyone was out back having some epic Flip Cup tournament and talking about the Cubbies, I was on the couch with a union cement pourer, taking Jameson shots, hugging as Jawbreaker fans do, and yelling every single word to that song at the stereo. He and I had casually talked records before, but I think that was a moment we really connected.

The reunion? I hope they make a million bucks. They deserve it. I already witnessed them endure the purist wringer when they signed to a major, and that seems so moot in 2017. However, I won't see them at Riot Fest. I lived in Chicago, but never went to Riot Fest, and have a million thoughts about it that aren't relevant to Jawbreaker. The one that does: there's a certain kind of performer that can create enough spectacle out of their music to entertain a massive audience in an outdoor venue. I don't think Jawbreaker is one of them. But, I also have never been around 60,000 people screaming "1-2-3-4 / Who's punk / What's the score," so what do I know?

Doug, teacher, has incredible hair and a preponderance of nice shirts, is someone I care about a great deal

My relationship with Jawbreaker is so intimately entwined with my coming of age that it is never really clear to me where Blake Schwarzenbach’s lyrics captured perfectly the fumblings and hurts of growing up and when those lyrics shaped my thoughts. If it is difficult for me to delineate this now, it was impossible for me when I was 19. At that age I was studying American literature in college, had my first band of any importance, fell in love and had my heart broken, and had what I thought was full control of the vices that would later haunt me. Dark secrets burn their vessel, it has been written, but at that age you can save them for later. It would be a few years until I fell from the wagon to the night train.

Fiction, reading and writing, was always more truthful to me. Looking back, it was because I wanted to write myself a better story. As a teenager I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion. Like many of us in those awkward years, that drove me into independent bookstores and record shops. Although it felt iconoclastic in my suburban Boston town, like most angsty teens I fell in love with poetry, really and specifically, Beat poetry. I tore through the novels of Jack Kerouac, reading his blend of truthful fiction at the same rate as his prose. Carrying around a battered and dog eared copy of Howl one day while in Newbury Comics is how a conversation started with the clerk filing CDs. She recommended Jawbreaker’s Bivouac, Crimpshrine’s Quit Talkin Claude, and Leonard Cohen’s New Skin For the Old Ceremony. A pretty solid haul.

Beats spoke to me, but they never felt that they were of my time. Schwarzenbach’s lyrics however, contained an urgency and quality that made Jawbreaker songs feel like they were happening to me in the moment. And he made it clear that he/we were drawing from the same well. And because I believe in desperate acts, the kind that make you look stupid, I desperately tried to start a band like Jawbreaker from there on. That took a few years, though. I had to wait until I was in college. Until then Jawbreaker was a constant soundtrack, with “P.S. New York is Burning” copied onto countless mixtapes and the band’s albums passed around like samizdat. To be accurate, I spent too much time hanging out with my very small circle of friends, drinking coffee, with just cigarettes to fill the gaps in our empty days.

The band I formed in college was in retrospect a little too overt influenced by Jawbreaker. We were punks, sure, but with the local scene enamored with The Overcast and The Ducky Boys, I often felt like I should apologize from the stage, saying something like “Sorry we ain’t hard enough to piss your parents off.” But again, Blake’s lyrics felt like he was writing my soundtrack. His being open with the struggles and politics of the East Bay punk scene was writ large what has happening in my very tiny little world (is there anything smaller with bigger stakes than your hometown punk scene?)

Hell is definitely sitting in a van with seven punks for countless hours on the road. Unwashed and unkempt, four in the band and the rest “road crew;” the smells, the boredom, and the lack of space would crack anyone. And it was the greatest time of my life. Booking a tour pre-internet was no joke (Book Your Own Fucking Life, RIP) [Ed note: BYOFL does seem to exist in web form] and a cross country tour when you have two seven inches out, one of them a split, is the kind of undertaking left only to young and foolish punks. Of course, we didn’t make it far. We broke down at the top of Massachusetts. Shows were off, it was pretty heavy. Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life. Like Sal Paradise we kept trying until we were able to cross this vast continent. Driving seven hundred miles to play to fifteen angry men is disheartening - except! - when you can turn on Jawbreaker’s “Tour Song.” In the van after load out, listening to 24 Hour Revenge Therapy I could realize that there was nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.

Out in Berkley, having finally made it to the storied Gilman Street venue [a place the subject of this essay series played many times] for a show, was the beginning of the end for my band - although at the time it didn’t seem that way. The drummer, a prolific zine pen pal and all around social mover of the group, was able to bring in more people than a relatively unknown touring band would normally. It was people from bands and labels, the good ones, plenty of stunning children, so before I went on I felt the swell of making it. Here I was, about to go on the stage and witness the scene that I had so romanticized. The set was over quickly and, after, I stood outside in the East Bay industrial park drinking a beer and feeling the chill of fall. It was one of the rare moments of contentment and I didn’t grasp that the moment was fleeting; more temporary than I could imagine.

Of the end that was about to befall my band, it had eerie parallels with the crack up and break up Jawbreaker. Their signing to a major label caused major rifts in scene politics and it felt like one had to take a side. We weren’t offered the storied million bucks that Jawbreaker was but we were offered more than we had from the large indie label that was taking bets in the post-Green Day landscape. I guess I’m not the gambling type, since it didn’t quite make sense to me to take the deal, but I was a minority in the band. Even at that level moving units and tracking charts seemed like a fool’s errand. However, the scene chafed and I grew so goddamned tired of fighting against the chains. I was able to play guitar a little better, and piano a little better too, so why not make better music?

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them. All the talk of musicianship and the tensions of (very minor) success is really just a cover. I was drinking too much at that point. After our LP was released to far less impact than we expected I had a moment in one of the rare times we sprung for a hotel room. I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I quit the band that night.

Truth is, now, years later, all I really need is hot good coffee, and a good, good book. Jawbreaker is reuniting, and I get it. Sometimes the past needs to be reckoned with in the present. Or maybe they just want to make some bank. The politics, optics, and aesthetics are debates I’ve left behind. I won’t go to the show because it will be familiar faces and still none to recognize. But I haven’t completely given up on nostalgia; I’ll still put on Jawbreaker records and bounce around with a foolish grin on my face. After all, it’s not that bad. I still have pictures. I look back.

#jawbreaker #unfun #24 hour revenge therapy #bivouac #blake schwarzenbach #adam pfahler #chris bauermeister #punk rock

3 notes · View notes

213hiphopworldnews · 5 years

Text

Here Are The Artists Performing At Coachella That Hip-Hop Fans Need To Check Out

Getty Image

Coachella has announced the lineup for its 2019 festival and as usual in recent years, it’s a diverse, eclectic group, running the gamut from underground rap and soul to dance, pop, and psychedelic rock. While its wide-ranging scope makes the festival a perfect format for music discovery, it’s not a “hip-hop” festival and for fans of specific genres like hip-hop, it can be a little difficult to sort out which artists on the roster suit your specific tastes, especially if you’ve never heard of some of these artists before.

Have no fear, though. We’re here to break down the must-see hip-hop artists performing at Coachella this year with a guide to the hottest acts hitting the festival’s many stages, from the newest up-and-comers to the established vets. This list doesn’t cover every hip-hop-related artist (some, like Wiz Khalifa and Kid Cudi, ought to be pretty self-evident). Instead, it focuses on the artists who’ve come — or will come — to dominate the conversation in hip-hop, the ones who will leave you with the greatest sense of FOMO should you miss out on their sets. Some are new, some you may have heard of before, but they’re all guaranteed to put on a show worth seeing.

070 Shake

This 21-year-old singer/rapper hails from North Bergen, New Jersey and is signed to Kanye West’s GOOD Music, which is still a recommendation in itself. She appeared all over the label’s 2018 spate of releases after making her debut with the six-song Glitter EP featuring “Mirrors” in the spring. 070 made her television debut during Kanye’s infamous SNL appearance performing “Ghost Town” alongside him and Kid Cudi. While she doesn’t have much of a catalog at the moment, her highlight track has the relatable title “I Laugh When I’m With Friends But Sad When I’m Alone.”

88Glam

88Glam is a Canadian duo signed to The Weeknd‘s XO Records. The two have fully embraced the glitchy, hazy dynamic their region is best known for, with a yin-and-yang dynamic that makes use of members Derek Wise and 88 Camino’s easygoing chemistry. Just picture Travis Scott, Future, and Nav getting chucked into a blender and turned into a smoothie of sneering one-liners and icy melodies set to the tune of the most lit 8-bit video game theme ever.

Burna Boy

Burna, a Nigerian Afrobeat singer best known for going viral when fans mistook his song “Ye” for Kanye’s album of the same name, caused a bit of controversy after the lineup reveal, fussing that his name appears too small on the flyer and calling himself an “African legend.” While he’s certainly earned the right to call himself that after an extensive grind that made him one of two Afrobeat artists on the flyer (the other being Mr. Eazi), Afrobeat’s relative obscurity to the average American concertgoer means that he’s pretty much honor bound to put on a show that no one forgets and introduce a well-established style to a whole new audience.

Childish Gambino

While Donald Glover is pretty well known by now and made a point of laying his Childish Gambino persona to rest on his last tour, Childish is still set to pop up at a few more festivals this year before (possibly) disappearing forever. After seeing what he can do with an arena show, I feel it’s pretty safe to say his set will silence the few remaining naysayers if it comes close to spectacle and extravagance of his final shows at the LA Forum, opening the door for Donald Glover to become everyone’s favorite singer/rapper for a good, long while.

Gucci Gang

Guwop has likely become best known for a certain generation of trap rap fans as the godfather and one of the originators of the style embraced by many of their favorite rising stars. And just like any good role model, he’s taken a pair of them, Lil Pump and Smokepurpp, under his wing with a moniker that caused some amusement and confusion among music fans who saw the name of Pump’s breakout hit attached to a photo of Atlanta’s reigning royal figure.

JPEGMafia

JPEG is loud, boisterous, and unconventional, a noise rapper from Baltimore, Maryland who mashes up experimental beats with an unusual life story and emotive, soul-baring flows. His album Veteran made a splash in 2018 with its melange of industrial soundscapes and loosely-constructed, cynical bars. He’ll throw a lot of listeners off at first glance much like Vince Staples, with whom he’s going on tour soon, but if you give him a chance, he can surprise you with how much you relate.

Juice WRLD

Juice‘s name should be familiar to pretty much anyone who’s taken a gander at the hip-hop landscape at any point in 2018 after his single “Lucid Dreams” launched him into the mainstream’s consciousness with its conspicuous Sting sample and endearing, dopey love story. Emo teens love him as much as grumpy boom-bap revivalists hate him, which is pretty much a guaranteed formula for success these days. It sure doesn’t hurt that he’s been working like a maniac, pumping out a mixtape, an album, and a collaborative tape with Future in the time it took “Dreams” to finally run its course.

Little Simz

No, that’s not a typo: Simz really does insist that you pronounce the “T’s” in her name, unlike the majority of American “Lil” rappers. Call it the proper British in this English rapper, whose diction extends to her fiery, intricate raps. She’s a bar spitter of the highest order and had the distinction of opening for Gorillaz during their Humanz tour and their Demon Dayz Festival, as well as being praised by Kendrick Lamar. She’s been in album mode throughout the past two years, and with the finished project dropping sometime in the near future, there’s no time like the present to get familiar with this import from across the pond.

Playboi Carti

I made the argument last year that Carti, the 22-year-old genre-less upstart from Atlanta, Georgia, deserved his own musical category after his album Die Lit broke every conventional rule of rap on its way to being a fan favorite. He may not bring much lyrical wizardry to the stage but he makes up for it in raw energy — it’s like trap jazz scatting, with hundred mile-a-minute ad-libs taking the place of limerick rhyme schemes and bass turned up to rib-shattering levels.

Rico Nasty

Speaking of bone-breaking, you’d best guard your grill if you end up in the pit at Rico’s set. Hands, arms, elbows, wigs, and weaves go flying when this brash young lady hits the stage. She doesn’t just rap, she screams her threats on her mixtape Nasty with a shocking blend of aggression and exuberance that resonates with her largely female fan base, sparking the sort of rambunctious reactions usually reserved for swaggering male artists. There’s a reason Rico is at the forefront of a revolution for women in hip-hop.

Smino

Smino had a laugh with the lineup announcement flyer himself, turning every artist name on the list into a version of his own. It’s his off-kilter sense of humor that informs the quirky, soulful raps that glide silkily along his funky beats. From eyebrow-raising metaphors to funkadelic-influenced melodies, Smino’s experimentations with the form are well-worth the price of admission.

SOB x RBE

This Bay Area band was introduced to a wider audience early last year on the soundtrack to Black Panther, but California natives have been rocking out to their post-Hyphy party raps for quite some time. They are as heavily influenced by The Pack as they are E-40, but one thing that always shines through in their energetic delivery is their sense of fun and the invitation to turn up higher than ever.

Tierra Whack

Take away the visual elements of Whack World — you know, the part that has been highlighted in all the praise she’s rightfully garnered — and what you have left is still an impressive collection of one-minute tunes that perfectly broadcast this Philly rapper’s musical breadth and depth despite their brevity. But what you might not expect is how well her performance translates to a big stage. Seeing her at Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival proved to me that she has all the talent and star power to justify the hubbub that surrounded her in 2018 and surpass it in the very near future.

Some of the artists listed here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

source https://uproxx.com/hiphop/coachella-hip-hop-artists-juice-wrld-rico-nasty/

#hiphop #hip hop legend #hip hop history #hip hop #music #trending #hip hop news #ballin #hip hop scen

0 notes