so, after all these years, i've finally found a streak of 90s screamo that i can acknowledge is actually not stupid - meaning i can stop being evasive on the topic. my standard response all these years has been "there's probably some underground screamo i would like if somebody showed me it, but i haven't spent any time looking for it because i've been listening to jazz and electronic music. it's just where my head is right now. the stuff you're talking about, though, is just a bunch of corporate garbage.". well, my head is back to punk, so i've gone looking. ironically, what i've found just sounds to me like a set of logical deductions stemming from nirvana and sonic youth. it's easy to derive the spoken word thing from slint, and maybe the connection is real, but it's just the same beat tradition that punk and no wave and grunge had already tapped into. which is to say that branching this off into it's own genre strikes me as arbitrary, but, if i were to do so, i'd have to claim it's alpha document is actually in utero (interspersed with influences from slint and drive like jehu).

this is stuff that was also really obscure at the time. ottawa wouldn't be the best place to live to tap into this, pre-internet era or not. these bands all made one or two records to almost no response and then disappeared. some of it actually seems to be known primarily through some more commercial indie rock that band members did later on. i'm going to guess that, at the time, people mostly interpreted it as a bunch of kids ripping off nirvana and yawned it out of existence. the ability to tell the subtle differences would have probably been lost on most, and interest probably would have been lost along with interest in nirvana (ironically). there does seem to be a huge influx in interest a little after the year 2000, when a bunch of kids went searching for it.

on the one hand, i'm glad some kids did do this research because it's making finding it a lot easier. on the other hand, i feel a little out of the loop for doing this in 2014 instead of 2004. i think my initial reaction was largely correct though - there was some stuff going on underground that i would have connected to, but it also seems like almost nobody knew this stuff existed at the time.

it's interesting to consider an alternate universe, though, where this more raw sound would been nirvana's legacy - rather than green day and korn (equally). if that were the case, i think cobain's ghost would probably feel a bit better about itself. and, strangely, what's spurred this on is actually a newish batch of hardcore bands with a decidedly noise-rock kind of sound....i'm going back and trying to figure out where they came from....and realizing i completely missed this undercurrent. again, though, this was an undercurrent that is only really traceable from it's endpoints.

this is a good example. it's a compilation of a few singles released in the early 90s, and seems to have been almost unknown until it was rereleased in 2002. it's been marketed variously as emo and post-hardcore, but it just strikes me as a solid no-wave/grunge record. i probably would have greatly enjoyed this had i heard it in 1994 or 1995.

https://futurerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/science-1994

like, there's a can reference in the second track. how many well known screamo bands reference can?

"This eight song LP was not an immediate success. When it first came out it was way ahead of its time and the LP didn't really start to sell until many years after the band had broken up.

At one point the LP completely stopped selling. In fact, it was selling so poorly that we recycled all the left over inserts and covers as it appeared that no one was really interested in Portraits of Past. This turned out to be a mistake. A few years later interest in the band exploded and we started to sell a lot of LPs. So many in fact that the LP was repressed, but the original covers and cover art were no longer available. So we ended up making these hand screened versions.

Portraits of Past started out as a screamo band, and their debut split 7" with Bleed captured that sound. But the LP was much more controlled and refined. It has a moody almost sad feel to it that is quite captivating. "

the "sad feel" actually reminds me a lot of do make say think, enough that i'm wondering if the dmst band members may have been in the handful of people that checked this out. that's actually entirely plausible (one of the guitarists is an open hardcore fan).

see, the thing about slint being a big influence is that they were also a big influence on the bands i was actually listening to. which makes it all the more of a shame that i wasn't aware of this stuff (but, as mentioned repeatedly, nobody was). it's like i'm coming face to face with an evil twin sibling or something, lol.

those were 94 and 96 - two of four bands i've found after 91 by following slint's influence outwards that i think are worth listening to. note that i've found four and rejected well over 100 (the other two are june of 44 and a minor forest, both of which i knew of but didn't listen to closely enough to get into. the two records i posted are completely brand new to me.). well over. i'm still snaking through, but i'm a little worried that this is going to dry up in '98 like everything else, leaving me no closer to filling that gaping early 00s hole. i mean, it's nice to find a few more 90s acts, but i like lots of 90s acts. there's lots of interesting abstract music from the early 00s that i'm aware of, but as far as actual rock bands go, ones that formed and released records in the early 00s, i couldn't fill up the fingers on one hand, honestly. don't bother - i've probably heard what you're thinking of and think it's awful.

i'm really cringing to find out just how badly and thoroughly refused completely fucked this all up.

i'm still hoping that little undercurrent is there, though.