indie rock

Record #1028: As Cities Burn – Hell or High Water (2009)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / Leave a comment

During my scene phase in high school, very few records hit me quite as hard as Son, I Loved You At Your Darkest. Even when I fell off of heavy music in favor of indie rock, I revisited that record quite often.

But it turns out I wasn’t the only one trading hardcore for indie rock. After losing their screamer and putting out one of the best Christian-adjacent post-hardcore records ever, As Cities Burn pulled a massive left turn and made an indie rock record. But despite this seismic shift, the group is just as emotive and cathartic as ever.

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Record #1024: Minus the Bear – Planet of Ice (2007)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It makes sense that I’m writing about this album when it’s 18º outside. What makes less sense is how it’s taken me so long to add it to my collection.

It’s not like I’m not a Minus the Bear fan. I saw them with mewithoutYou and Thursday a year before this record and they blew me away. Menos El Oso is one of my comfort records. David Knudson is one of my favorite guitarists, and many of my other favorite guitarists have been influenced by his two-handed tapping technique—and myself.

But as Minus the Bear’s career continued, I lost track of them. When I came back to them, it seemed like their later albums made less of a priority on technique and more on using effects to obscure the instrument entirely. As Menos el Oso had more effects work and less tapping than Highly Refined Pirates, casual listens brought me to the conclusion that the proportion between Menos and Planet of Ice was roughly the same.

Those most have been some casual listens, because I was dead wrong.

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Record #953: Lift to Experience – The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads (2001)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It seems no matter how deep I dig (and boy, do I dig deep sometimes), there’s always some seminal release I’ve missed—even in the exact scenes I’ve been trudging through. Take for example Lift to Experience, whom I had never heard of before a review referred to my own band as “We have Lift to Experience at home” (a favorable comparison, I hope).

I’m constantly fascinated by the points of reference other people have when they hear us, so I checked out this band that we were purportedly ripping off. Truth be told, it seems like the only immediate comparison is our shared devotion to overdriven guitars and reverb pedals. But when I divorced them from the comparison, I found a wonderfully idiosyncratic record that lands directly in that sweet spot between shoegaze and post rock that I love so much—bad hip hop parody artwork aside.

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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 #926: The Anniversary – Designing A Nervous Breakdown (2000)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

They say hindsight is 20/20, but I’m not sure that’s the case. The lens of nostalgia often glazes over details with a broad brush, homogenizing the intricate diversity of moments in time into a monotone.

Take, for instance, the second wave of emo. While revisionist history might paint a scene of twinkly guitars and angular drumming (thanks, American Football), the view from the ground was far different. Emo was not nearly as much a matter of a sound as it was an ethos.

One of the best examples of emo’s diversity is The Anniversary. While emo was undoubtedly rooted in punk and hardcore, their debut record Designing A Nervous Breakdown borrows much of its palette from decidedly non-punk sources, offering up a heaping helping of hooks, harmonies, and synthesizers. While it doesn’t sound like what anyone might think of when they imagine emo, it remains one of the most well-loved emo records of the era.

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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 #921: Frightened Rabbit – Pedestrian Verse (2013)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

For all my seemingly-encyclopedic knowledge of the musical landscape, I have a few glaring blind spots. There are musicians who have left indelible marks on the world that have left me unscathed. Bands with massive cult followings that I have ignored. Albums that have changed lives while I have moved on oblivious.

These omissions are numerous. But I get the notion that few are more glaring, foolish, and maybe even offensive than my ignorance of Frightened Rabbit, who for years has floated amorphously in a nebulous blob with the Mountain Goats, Mount Eerie, Lord Huron, and any other songwriter-heavy project with a full band name that my brain categorizes together because of their similar names.

But recently, a friend who is a fan learned of the Frightened-Rabbit-shaped hole in my heart and sought to fill it himself, ordering me a copy of their fourth record, Pedestrian Verse, which I gather is a dark horse fan favorite. And while it’s going to take time for me to absorb this record the way it’s meant to, it’s immediately apparent why the band is so beloved. Continue reading →

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 #882: Curtail – When the Sway Sets (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Sometimes, a record doesn’t need to have high aspirations to be great. It doesn’t need to redefine the boundaries of genre or have some intricate narrative thread. It doesn’t need to offer up some transcendent experience to the listeners.

Sometimes, it just needs to be really, really catchy.

And that’s about the best way I can think to describe this record from Curtail, an Akron quartet made up of emo veterans that delivers effortlessly infectious tunes that isn’t quite emo, but isn’t quite not emo either.

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Record #847: Foals – Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost—Part 1 (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

A trip to the record store used to be spontaneous. I would usually walk out with a small stack from bands I had never heard of before, or at least albums I had never listened to. These days, I’m far more intentional with my budget. I have a to-buy list that is constantly revisited and revised with repeated listens, organized by some careful calculus of how much I enjoy it and how inexpensively I can get the record.

Sometimes though, the old tinge of spontaneity will spark again, and I’ll take a calculated risk. In this case, I had been familiar with Foals for many years—Holy Fires still gets a decent amount of play time, but I’ve never ventured into the rest of their catalog. At least, until I found a sealed copy of Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost—Part 1 (a title borrowed from the warning screen from the original Legend of Zelda) at a local shop for a price I couldn’t ignore. And as gambles sometimes do, this one paid off.

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