Month: September 2021

Record #800 – Elliott Smith – Elliott Smith (1995)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

There have been hundreds of singer/songwriters that have put out stripped-down songs armed primarily with an acoustic guitar and their own voice. But even among such a crowded throng, Elliott Smith is celebrated as a truly unique voice.

And while Either/Or may be the album most people point to as his opus, the self-titled album that preceded it showcases a raw aesthetic, free of the baroque and powerpop leanings of later albums. And stripped down as it is, it maybe hits a little closer to the heart of Smith’s legacy.

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Record #799: Godspeed You! Black Emperor – F♯ A♯ ∞ (1997)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few bands have such celebrated reputations as  Godspeed You! Black Emperor. They are inarguably one of the pillars of the post rock movement—and rightly so. Their body of work is marked by a fiercely uncompromising vision, their albums filled with lengthy compositions that make no effort to be accessible. At this point in history, fans and critics alike revere their experimental ethos and artistic stubbornness.

But debuting with that sort of vision without the benefit of the legacy is a different sort of monster. The legendary post rock collective might be able to get away with releasing an album with two twenty-minute songs with multiple movements and no lyrics, but as a debut? That’s a bit more difficult to sell as an introduction.

Lucky for us though, Godspeed didn’t let pesky things like marketability or accessibility get in the way of their debut record.

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Record #798: Five Iron Frenzy – Until This Shakes Apart (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

If you would have asked me ten years ago which band’s new album I’d be most excited for in 2021, it would have taken me hundreds of guesses to finally land on Five Iron Frenzy. After all, I first discovered them in 7th grade, and I’d hope to have grown out of goofy ska songs and Pants Operas in the space of twenty-one years.

However, I realize now that all of their wry, irreverent humor was a sort of Trojan horse, through which they smuggled cutting criticisms of the Church’s hypocrisy toward racism, police brutality, and greed into youth group kids’ Discmans.

While these messages have always been hiding amid the upstrokes, horn lines, and bad puns, Until This Shakes Apart pulls off all pretense, abandoning their wooden horse in favor of a full-on frontal assault.

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Record #797: Black Swift – See Me Human (2017)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

When you release a record produced by a legend like Sylvia Massy, you run the risk of undermining your previous releases. When the core of your musical essence is uncovered and enhanced by such a skilled architect, it might make the releases before that feel cluttered and unfocused.

Might is the keyword there, especially in the case of Black Swift’s See Me Human, which I’m coming to backwards from their fantastic Desert Rain EP. While it doesn’t have the sonic clarity that Massy brought to that disc, See Me Human has the same passionate songwriting and raw rock and roll, giving it more than enough clout to stand on its own.

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Record #796: You Could Be a Cop/Amid the Old Wounds – Split (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Perhaps the biggest problem with emo is how the term has been fundamentally misunderstood.

When the term finally broke into the cultural lexicon in the early 2000s, it was mostly attached to bands like Panic! At the Disco, Green Day, and My Chemical Romance, who are not emo bands—MCR would even tell you this themselves. And yet, legions of yuppies and soccer moms would see dark clothes, shaggy hair, and eyeliner and attach the three-letter epithet to it. Even bands who did claim the tag for themselves in those days bore little resemblance to the emo bands of yore.

But over the last several years, a crop of musicians have risen up to free the word Emo from the girl jeans of its mallcore misappropriation and return to the sparkling guitars, patient dynamics, and mournful vocals of the scene’s earlier days.

And this split, between Norway’s You Could Be A Cop and Germany’s Amid the Old Wounds, is a perfect example of what emo is supposed to be.

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Record #795: Daughters – You Won’t Get What You Want (2018)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It was almost impossible to escape the hype bestowed upon You Won’t Get What You Want. The ominous album art appeared everywhere, accompanied by choruses of friends telling me that I just had to listen to it, man, it’s incredible.

So I did. And I admit: I didn’t get it.

But in the time since, I’ve continued to see it lauded. A few friends list it in their all-time favorite records. A few publications named it one of the best of the decade. One friend in particular harassed me over its absence in any of my aesthetic collections on my 3×3 record display. And so I was bid, by peer pressure, FOMO, and a newfound appreciation for Nine Inch Nails and industrial music in general, to give it more time.

And, as often happens with challenging statements like this, one day it just clicked.

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Record #794: The Armed – Ultrapop (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Genre alchemy gets into diminishing returns pretty quickly. While fusion was once incredibly revolutionary, the internet has hastened the pace of these reactions so that there’s almost no crossover that hasn’t been tried.

We’re almost two decades past the advent of Girl Talk, whose genre-defying mashups saw acts like Fleetwood Mac, Ludacris, The Ramones, Lil Missy, Radiohead, Jay-Z, and Metallica featured on the same track. Babymetal debuted eleven years ago. Ill-conceived chimeras like crunkcore and emo rap are now old enough to vote. Then you have the entire crop of bands blending metal with shoegaze, post-rock, spirituals, and even Azerbaijani folk music.

Genre-bending alone isn’t enough to make compelling music.

So it’s a good thing that Ultrapop has much more to its credit, because this is one of the freshest takes on genre fusion in a long time.

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Record #793: Deafheaven – Infinite Granite (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

The backlash from “A Great Mass of Color” came so quickly, they might as well have been included in the press release. Black metal purists were quick to point to the undistorted guitars, lack of blast beats, and (gasp) clean vocals as proof that Deafheaven weren’t kvlt.

Subsequent singles rebutted the idea that it might be a one-off. And now that the album is out, we can see for ourselves that this softer palette weaves itself through the entire album. Even longtime fans have turned on them, saying this record sounds like an entirely different band. They’ve lost the plot. They’ve sold out.

And the whole time, I’ve said the same thing to them: besides the vocals, this is what Deafheaven has sounded like the whole time. 

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Record #792: Christie Front Drive – Stereo (1996)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Emo kid that I was, I’ve discovered the last few years that there’s a fair amount of the genre that I missed. Obviously I was aware of early pioneers like Sunny Day Real Estate and Mineral, but that was through turn-of-the-millennium bands like Further Seems Forever, The Juliana Theory and twothirtyeight. I was a big Jimmy Eat World fan, but I was far more familiar with Bleed American than Clarity.

I say this to explain that even though Christie Front Drive have been cult favorites among Second Wave emo fans, I had given very little playtime before buying this LP on the strength of their reputation alone.

And let me tell you what: 16-year-old Nat would have eaten this record up.

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