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deathtokoalas

nobody called them emo until like the early 00s, when a backstory was created. at the time, they were variously considered 'grunge' or 'post-grunge', and often compared to candlebox as a part of a second wave of seattle acts. i mean, they are, after all, a dissonant-heavy 90s rock band from seattle with vaguely punk roots.

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deathtokoalas
self-mutilation is waaaaaay older than emo. and i'm not even convinced that's more than a bad stereotype.

i didn't really start seeing kids start dressing like that until around '01 or '02, and my first impression was actually that they were into ebm/industrial. it took me a while to realize otherwise.

i actually really liked this band in the 90s, but they weren't connected to jawbox or weezer or any of that other stuff. well, i liked weezer, too. everybody liked weezer! i pointed out that the media compared them to candlebox, but that didn't really make a lot of sense, either.

you know what did make sense as a comparison? radiohead. everybody i knew that liked one liked the other. it was on a radiohead mailing list that i was first introduced to sdre. if you bumped into a radiohead fan at a party, sdre would have been a reasonable topic of conversation.

another band that shared large amounts of fans with sdre and radiohead at the time was sigur ros. also, the smashing pumpkins - although they had a much larger and much more diverse fan base. i knew about saetia waaaaaay before they were cool by checking out np: tags at alt.fan.smashing-pumpkins. thought they sucked, actually :P

so, the point is to be careful about what you read in press releases and corporate penned biographies. hint: two members of sdre joined the foofighters, making owning the rights to sdre lucrative shit.

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deathtokoalas
i don't know of any 90s emo band members that cut themselves, either, though. not that i'm paying close attention or anything...

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

bass influence, on the track, especially in the bridge.

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless))

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

i think it's a shame that corgan never fully explored his cyber-metal. i mean, there's some material out there, but he never did an opus and sort of ended up getting upstaged on it by bands like boris.

this was about as metal as i ever really got or ever wanted to get (not due to lack of looking, it's just that the genre becomes self-parody at nearly the moment it amps itself - through the course of my life, and since the 80s at least, it's been virtually impossible to do metal without sounding like an idiot), and informed my punchier outbursts on the track in question. i specifically remember thinking to myself "i want it to hit as hard as xyu". :).

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless), liquify, first movement)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

guitars, and song structures. i haven't analyzed it, but this sets itself apart from a lot of fuzzy riff music by the fact that it's written in a weird modal key (rather than just building itself up on boring old fifths. those iommi riffs are fun, but they're fucking dead on any level of musicality. this isn't.). love the unexpected intervals that show up in the lead part near the end, but it's the way the riffs shift through the chorus underneath the fuzz like some kind of demented cello that really captured my attention and my imagination...

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless), many others)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

guitars, and song structures. this is one of corgan's guitar masterpieces and one of the corgan tracks that i took the time to teach myself how to play. during this brief period over '98, i was actually trying to keep the excessive soloing down, but the bridge in this track, specifically, was important in the writing of viewless.

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless), many others)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

song structuring. also, the jazz chords he's using (not just here but throughout the record).

again: i loved this record as a compromise between heavy riffage and melodic content. regardless of your views of his later work, you can't take this raw pop-punk classic away from the guy.

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless))

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

anybody else pick up the similarity between this track and sdre's "8"?

i loved this disc - great compromise between the heavy and the melodic. it's truly a shame what's become of dave grohl, but it's not fair to take this first disc away from him.

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless))

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

it's always weird for me to cite sdre as an influence, given how oblivious i was to what they supposedly represented (i remain convinced that the history written around the band is mostly bullshit) and the reality that i only ever really liked lp2. but, i did love that record for a few years and do still come back to it

...and i did rip the riff to 8 off pretty blatantly in my tune viewless, which was first demoed in late '96.

(relevant tracks: teenage jesus (viewless))

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post. i used to listen to this on repeat for hours...

(relevant tracks: teenage jesus (epilag), jesus gets fucked on robitussin, others)

(i think this was a link to nurse with wound's spooky loop, from the foxtrot comp for jhon balance, which does not appear to be available on youtube)