One thing that happens to me very, very often is that I’ll get a song stuck in my head for a fixed period of time. This could be hours or even days. While sometimes it’s due to a track that I listened to on purpose, such as putting on a record or playing a track in my library, many times it’s because it’s something that was mentioned in conversation, played randomly in an environment I was in or just by accident. Often these tracks will be somewhat enjoyable to be stuck in my head, yet there are times where it’s a track I can’t stand but just stubbornly sits there in my brain — tracks even as daft as “Smooth” by Rob Thomas and Santana which for me was a very low point of late 90s mainstream pop/rock fare.
A couple of weeks or so ago I was assembling a playlist to refresh my listening options for what was to be music for a 2-3 hour drive to the south of Scotland for an extended weekend getaway as I felt I had been listening to the same stuff in the car for ages. And in creating this playlist there were a few things I put in this playlist — which totalled out to a sizeable 20 hours in length — that were dumped in there by accident.
One such track was the opening track from a band called The Farewell Bend called “Heads Down” from the band’s one and only album In Passing that was released back in 1998. It came on randomly during the drive without my knowledge of putting it in the playlist and then for the following few days it was circling around my head like some strange earworm. I guess the style would be what is now referred to as “Midwest US melodic emo”, although I don’t really seem to remember that term being used at the time. Overall I never really got into that sound, which sort of crystalised in the second half of the 1990s. It was time when what could loosely be called “emotional hardcore” started to fork into various subgenres and in turn, started to fan out those active in that general scene into different camps. A good number of American bands and the musicians that comprised them started to work with more melodic elements, often pulling more and more influence from indie rock and even what’s called heartland rock to smooth out what were previously more discordant and aggressive tendencies of earlier releases by those involved.
When this style started to pick up starting in 1995-1997 with bands like The Promise Ring, The Get Up Kids, Cap’n Jazz and American Football — just to name a few — I really sort of lost interest. I was also at the time starting to move beyond just listening to hardcore/post-hardcore and more into classic, darker post-punk as well as more synth/new wave oriented music. Something that had a certain darkness that these aforementioned bands had for me a total absence of.
There’s a small handful of exceptions to this, and that includes The Farewell Bend. Perhaps it’s just the sheer melodic grace that this track has. There’s a vibe to the tracks that for me reminds me a bit of Bob Mould (ex-Hüsker Dü) or even fellow Minnesotans The Replacements going on here and it’s all assembled well with the a production quality that works so nicely for it — with the engineers and producers involved pulling cues more from the Bob Weston school of production. Perhaps it’s the track having just the right amount of discord, stops and starts and clever arrangements and parts.
I believe I used to have this album on CD and like many CDs from that time in my life, they were all left behind a Salvation Army thrift store in Vancouver back in 2007 as the deadline clock was ticking down so fast ahead of a massive, life-changing move over to the UK a bit later that year. Everything had to go! And fast! I remember the liner notes — which I’ve found below — to be written in a rather deadpan and frank play by play chronology of how the album was recorded in brief, to-the-point sentences, which I found rather charming:
When I acquired this album I had already moved to other pastures of music and probably passed on like many other post-hardcore bands of the late 1990s. However, this track has sort of stuck there and bubbles up periodically and I think the main reason for that as this band had pulled its membership from two great, mid-90s bands that came before it — Boy’s Life and Giant’s Chair — whom came from the post-hardcore thing happening at the time and then in turn I was listening those two bands, as well as many others, in my teenage years.
I became aware of Boy’s Life by way of underground zines and mail order catalogues at the time, seeing their first self-titled LP listed which I had interest in. I was a bit young and perhaps ignorant — living on Vancouver Island still — to even calculate trying to order that LP that came out on Krank! Records as I couldn’t find it in any record stores. Their second album Departures & Landfalls I picked up in 1996 after it had been released on Headhunter/Cargo, and moves from a more noisy, DC-leading post-hardcore sound towards melody and what I would say is the band’s interpretation of atmosphere, which gives the tracks sort of a hazy yet mysterious feel of longing. This apparently was the band’s approach here, as confirmed in a more recent interview an old Vancouver friend and now music journalist Gregory Adams did with the band’s singer/guitarist Brandon Butler for his excellent online blog/column Gut Feeling.
And then we have Giant’s Chair — for me a very underrated “power trio” from the same city — and of which I still own their two LPs, 1995’s Red and Clear and 1996’s Purity And Control which still stick out as stand-out physical artifacts in my record shelf, due to their beautiful and minimal LP jackets, both printed on uncoated cardstock with some amazing letterpress and lithographic minimal design — so minimal it gives the band a weird cloud of mystery about them.
The band’s guitarist and vocalist — Scott Hobart — for me is a total lost gem of guitar playing from that era. There’s a lot of complexity and tasteful virtuosity in his playing style, which manages to fill out the songs with dense chords and often playing rhythm and lead melodies at the same time. He also has an amazing feel for adding in the right amount of discordant “open” string notes which add a lot of interesting textures to the music. I could probably go on here more, but maybe I’ll save that for another time.
There were a number of mid-west record labels that were releasing some stuff I was into at the time, including Caulfield Records (1988-2003), which had released the two Giant’s Chair LPs, and File 13 Records, the latter started in 1989 folded at some point in the 2000s and then re-opened again a number of years later and is still running to this day.
Both bands imploded around the same time — around 1997 — but in recent years have started playing again, with Boy’s Life recently getting a 4xLP retrospective treatment called Home Is A Highway from the Numero Group, who have been in recent years putting out a lot of amazing re-issue treatments of bands from this era, the most notable being an incredible series of box sets from one of my favourite bands from that time — Unwound — starting in the mid 2010s.
And then Giant’s Chair came out and released a new album called Prefabylon on Spartan Records in 2019, which is a super nice continuation of their work done in the 90s and yet still fits in well with today’s current crop of rock/post-hardcore.
Spartan Records are also responsible for giving The Farewell Bend‘s In Passing a re-release in 2021 as well.
Now attempting to wrap up this entry with a closing final note, one release on File 13 that I used to own in the 90s was a 7″ called Fall Through by a band called Five-O which was released in early 1994. There’s not much information about this band anymore, and you can’t “stream” their stuff with any sort of convenience these days except for a couple of random clips on YouTube. Coming from the same general scene and location (they were from Little Rock, Arkansas) as the other bands in this piece, Five O’s music was more rooted in the punk and hardcore of the late 80s and early 80s. Here I’ve posted their track “Shatterproof” which absolutely shreds. I love the vocals on this one that at times sound melodic and snotty and then just goes to absolute unleashed screaming rage, especially after the guitar breakdown at the end — sounds absolutely, hair-raisingly brutal and like being run over by a freight train. The whole recording sounds like it’s blowing out the meter levels on the small studio it was likely recorded in and serves the track well. Still sounds as powerful as when I first heard it around 30 years ago.