It's hard to believe that 2003 occurred five years ago. I was ending my third/beginning my fourth year of college, thankful to be nearly done with school yet hesitant to face what lay beyond. Twenty-aught-three was a good year for music and it provided a great soundtrack for this soon-to-be transitional phase of my life. The music was so great that it killed me to only choose five tracks. Killed me. I'm dead now.
Suffering & the Hideous Thieves - "St. Elizabeth"In the 1990's Jeff Suffering was best known for heading the spazzpunk outfit 90lb Wuss. As the 90's progressed so too did Suffering's freedom to experiment, and Wuss's sound evolved from (and I use these terms loosely and probably inappropriately) skate-punk to grind-punk to some sort of hard-to-define pseudo-space-core punk-ish. All through these incarnations the band's sound remained gritty and aggressive. So it came as a surprise when Suffering organized his Hideous Thieves and released Real Panic Formed in 2002. Clean vocals! Slow tempos! Strings! And the moodiest music ever recorded. It was brilliant. It still is brilliant. The following year, the year we're actually focusing on, S&tHT did a split with an ether-ish pixie-voiced band called The Hush Hush. The Hush Hush songs are good, but the Hideous Thieves songs are absolutely glorious. Listen here as St. Elizabeth starts in a romantic-but-melancholy way, beautiful strings bending around lyrics about writing desperate notes in blood. But from these depressing depths the song moves backwards, reminiscing about happier times, adding layers, eventually exploding like a moment of passion, then tailing off again (as those moments of passion inevitably do) until we're right back to where we started. This is a song that resonates long after its over, and even though I can't personally relate to the lyrics they (hand-in-hand with the music) still somehow strike a familiar chord within.
...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - "Intelligence"The concept behind the EP The Secret of Elena's Tomb is as interesting as the songs themselves. Read about it HERE and be thoroughly grossed out. The songs on the EP seem to be loosely inspired by the story (as opposed to being directly about it), and as far as I can tell "Intelligence," the final song on the disc, doesn't have much to do with necrophilia. It DOES have much to do with freakin' awesomeness, and listening to this song makes me want to run through a brick wall. It starts of mellowly, even casually, but then the drum machine kicks in, and the rhythm follows, and suddenly you're listening to a metronome made of rock 'n' roll. Three-and-a-half minutes in things suddenly fall apart for no reason, but as if nothing happened at all it quickly reassembles before eventually squealing to a halt. The song is a sub-electronic departure for the band but no less an awesome one. The kids are hopped up now, indeed.
Cat Power - "He War"According to ye olde Wikipedia Chan Marshall is dissatisfied with the recording of this song. Whatever. It does sound hastily mixed, but it's totally to the song's benefit as it adds a brittle edge to the manic lyrics. There are actually a lot of little things that make this song great. The tinkly intro keys, the "hey hey hey," the double vox, the processed vocals in verse #2, and when the song picks up near the beginning it doesn't let up until the end. Lulls are for suckers. That's Dave Grohl boom-tappin' the drums, by the way.
Beloved - "Defect From Decay"For a few short years Beloved (the North Carolinian Beloved) was the greatest thing to happen to music. The music was all at once beautiful and aggressive, much like early Hopesfall. What differentiated Beloved from Hopesfall (as well as most other "melodic-core" bands) were Josh Moore's clean vocals. Not only was he on-key (which already gave him the advantage over other singers in the genre), but he was also a very good singer. Naturally there had to be screaming too, and anybody can scream into a microphone. But Beloved's screamer, drummer Joe Musten, had a voice that could wipe out armies. Somehow he found the strength to beat the crap out of his set while bellowing mightily at the same time. And as if the vocal tandem wasn't enough the band also had a fantastic sense of melody. The pretty parts were indeed very pretty, but even while they were throwing down and being all XcoreX the THREE guitars continued to paint rich sweeping musical pictures. I chose this song from Failure On because listening to it is like getting punched in the face over and over. We could all use a punch in the face.
Viva Voce - "Brightest Part of Everyone"Viva Voce's 1998 debut full-length release, Hooray For Now, was good, full of straight-ahead pretty-voiced rock, but it only hinted at things to come. For a long time, actually, it seemed there would be no follow up. Their record company folded soon after the album's release and though they released an independent EP in 2000 they weren't heard from again (by me anyway) until a 2002 split with Soul Junk. At this point their sound had wildly diverged from that initial release and 2003's Lovers Lead the Way, full of creative and crafty sounds, shows it. A husband and wife duo, Anita Robinson usually takes the vocal lead, but here she does the angelic background thing while Kevin Robinson croons away. The music is murky but rhythmic (clap along!) until the chorus where everything, save for an acoustic guitar and the vocals, drops out. Then the bouncy fuzz comes right back and takes us to the next chorus which happens to be at the very end of the song. It's all at once positive and moody. It's also completely enjoyable.
