Alternative

Record #938: Anchors – Adult Decisions (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Go to local shows.

I cannot emphasize this point enough. Beneath the glimmer of mainstream music is a thriving ecosystem of artists who are just as good (or better!) than anything you might find on on the radio. And while some folks might scoff and say, “but I don’t know any of those bands!”, the discovery is the point.

A few weeks ago, my band played a show in a city we’d never been, and we were delighted by both the reception we received and the quality of the bands we played with. For the point of this post, I’ll draw special attention to Anchors, playing that night as a solo act on electric guitar. I got a copy of the album and found that while the stripped-down arrangements helped to highlight David Black’s clever songwriting, the full band versions on record don’t obscure it any.

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Record #925: …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – Source Tags & Codes (2002)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In the summer of 2005, my high school band played a show in a dude’s parents’ garage (that dude is now a member of the excellent band JAGALCHI). In between bands, a song was playing that gave the same sort of frantic post-hardcore as At the Drive-In. I was transfixed and asked what it was. The answer was a band called …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. A couple years later, I stumbled upon their album Source Tages & Codes in the used CD section of my local record store. I bought it without hesitation.

But as I listened to it, I found it a bit too scattered to get my head around it. There were moments of the chaotic bliss that grabbed my attention, but they were brief and rare among a bevy of anthemic emo songs, theatrical prog, and, to my dismay (then) power pop songs.

With the space of two decades between my first impression and finding it for free on The Sound of Vinyl’s Father’s Day sale, I’ve realized that what I initially saw as scatterbrained is actually sprawling, offering a snapshot of the early 2000s alt scene that includes bits of every subgenre’s tendencies.

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Record #922: Alanis Morissette – Jagged Little Pill (1995)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In which a Canadian teenybopper pop star turns into an eldritch demigod.

It’s always funny to me when the Rock and Roll Boys’ Club reacts to the rise of some young female rocker with upturned noses (see: Avril Lavigne, Olivia Rodrigo, Michelle Branch, Billie Eilish, etc) when one of the greatest rock albums of all time was released by the quintessential rock ingénue.  For as much as rock music postures itself as a man’s world, in 1995 Alanis Morissette (then twenty-one) laced up her Doc Martins and went toe-to-toe with the entire alt-rock landscape.

Nearly thirty years later, Jagged Little Pill remains as fierce and apocalyptic as ever. It’s a breakup album in the form of a military strike, offering proof to the old proverb that Hell hath no fury quite like this.

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Record #915: Joe Baughman + the Righteous Few – Antichrist Complex (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I’ve spent much of my life trying to fight the idea that the “local” in “local bands” is a polite way of saying “bad.” After all, if they were any good, wouldn’t they have graduated from being local bands, right? We all know the universe unilaterally reward talent with notoriety to a proportional degree, right? Obviously, we know that’s absurd, but the idea persists.

One of my most frequent rebuttals to this prejudice is my friend Joe Baughman and his backing band, that is most recently called The Righteous Few. Their performances, whether in a theater or a basement, have been filled with the sort of ambitious, freewheeling quirkiness that brought acts like Arcade Fire and Sufjan Stevens to prominence. While there’s no real substitute for seeing this costume-clad beastly collective in person, Antichrist Complex is the closest they’ve ever put to tape, complete with horn and string sections, instrument changes, and lyrics just as manic as the unpredictable swirl of folk rock, funk, and gospel bursting out of the band.

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Record #910: The Cure – The Cure (2004)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Here’s the big wrinkle in my personal journey as a Cure fan. I’ve spent several of the last posts talking about how I’d mostly ignored the legendary group until recently, barring a few attempts to familiarize myself with their more celebrated records.

Except that I’ve owned a CD copy of their self-titled record since the mid 2000s. At one point, I even owned the maxi CD single for “alt.end,” which includes the excellent B-side “Why Can’t I Be Me?”

As many people have pointed out, though, this album is maybe the least representative thing they’ve put out, sticking out like a raucous sore thumb in their decidedly less noisy catalog, which makes the decision to christen it with their own name curious. But buried beneath the aggressive performances and in-your-face production is a collection of songs that showcase everything that makes the Cure the Cure.

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Record #909: The Cure – Seventeen Seconds (1980)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Everyone has to start somewhere. For the Cure, that somewhere was Three Imaginary Boys, a charming if inauspicious collection of Buzzcocks-y songs that was more Pablo Honey than Are You Experienced, even if they did sneak the world’s weirdest Jimi Hendrix song onto it. The release was largely ignored until the later single “Boys Don’t Cry,” after which their debut was rereleased with a different track listing that included that hit.

But then two important things happened. First, the Cure toured with labelmates and goth pioneers Siouxsie and the Banshees, for whom Robert Smith even filled in on guitar after their guitarist quit midtour.

Second, they added bassist Simon Gallup to the band. While bassists are often overlooked, Gallup brought a brooding drive to the band’s rhythm section that would go on to be a major part of the group’s sound, and was a big part of why this is the first record in the group’s catalog where the Cure starts to feel like the Cure™.

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Record #906: The Cure – Bloodflowers (2000)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

Let me start by explaining that my recent Cure obsession isn’t totally aimless: my podcast cohost and I decided to take an episode to do a deep dive through the legendary Goths’ discography—a daunting task for anyone, but especially for someone who had largely ignored their legacy for most of their life (namely, me).

While I’d already spent a decent amount of time with some of their most celebrated releases, I set off to familiarize myself with everything I was unfamiliar with. I’ve spent the last couple weeks binging their albums, reading Wikipedia and album reviews like I was cramming for college finals, and filling in the gaps in my Cure collection.

One thing that I learned during this time is that usually, the general consensus about each Cure album is mostly trustworthy. If an album is good, everyone says it’s good. If it’s bad, everyone says it’s bad.

But there is one blindingly glaring exception to that rule: 2000s Bloodflowers, a brilliant and understated record that is almost universally maligned. And while I’ll admit that its artwork does it no favors, this is one case where the collective music historian consciousness is very mistaken.

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Record #436 (Revisited): The Cure – Disintegration (1989)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

“I never quite said what I wanted to say to you,” mumbles Robert Smith in the closing moments of Disintegration, and those words might as well be about my original post about this record.

Because I’ve been listening to a lot of the Cure lately. Actually, that’s probably an understatement. In the last two weeks, I’ve listened to almost nothing else. I’ve listened to each record in their discography at least once, purchased many, and revisited the ones already in my collection multiple times.

Part of this is because my wife is on vacation with our baby and there’s no better soundtrack for an empty house, but the much larger part is that there’s maybe no other band that has had such a far-reaching influence or massive impact without ever compromising or contradicting themselves.

And while I’ve reviewed the several new Cure records in my collection over the last week, I need to come back to their perennial classic, Disintegration. I wrote a post on this record when I got it six years ago, but I’m compelled to make another, because friends, I have a lot to say about this record. 

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Record #905: The Cure – The Head on the Door (1985)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

If there’s one thing Robert Smith hates, it’s being pigeonholed. After releasing a gloomy trio of goth rock classics in the early part of the decade, Smith began to feel like his band was misunderstood as producers of monochromatic dourness. With a slightly shifted lineup, they released a trio of standalone pop singles that shattered the conception that they were one note.

And while that same pop perfection failed to infiltrate their following album, The Top, their 1985 record The Head on the Door was a masterpiece of hook-laden pop songs that didn’t forsake their mastery of dark atmospheres.

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Record #904: The Cure – Faith (1981)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 2 Comments

As it turns out, my mid-thirties aren’t too late for my first Cure phase. And friends, this phase is deep, and I have no recourse against the urge to fill in the gaps in my collection for one of the deepest and most rewarding discographies of all time.

Just like Rome though, the Cure wasn’t built in a day. It took a few releases for them to find their own voice. But Faith, their third record, is where the spectral, teased-hair silhouette of their legacy started to take shape, introducing gossamer atmospheres and dirgelike tempos to their increasingly dark post punk. And while it’s still massively indebted to bands like Joy Division, Television, and Siouxsie and the Banshees (who Robert Smith would briefly play guitar for later), it’s the clearest picture of The Cure to come they had yet released.

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