Buried Treasure is a semi-regular feature that explores some hidden musical gems – the rare and forgotten B-sides, covers, hidden tracks, live versions and alternative takes that deserve some recognition.
Drive Like Jehu is violence. Their music more like a punch in the nose than orchestrated chords and rhythm. The guitars shriek and twist like exposed rebar after a post-apocalyptic nuclear rain. The drums and bass repeatedly drive their gnarled fists into your chest with savage brutality. The vocals slash and scream across all the bedlam like a feral animal with an unquenchable thirst for blood.
In the annals of post-hardcore Drive Like Jehu have an almost divine status. They’ve managed to influence everything from Tacoma based metal band Botch to Modest Mouse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JEkDShKoc
Yank Crime was released in 1994. It wasn’t soon after the records release that Drive Like Jehu broke up. This sudden departure and the member’s post-Jehu projects helped gain the band an almost cult like status. What D.C. had started with the post-hardcore movement Drive Like Jehu perfected. The post-hardcore sound of D.C. would eventually grow and gain influence during it’s pre-internet crawl across America. One of these places was Jehu’s home city of San Diego where bands started adopting what would be called the “San Diego Sound”.
Nestled within all the chaos of every track on Yank Crime there is always a hint of calculation. With Yank Crime there is a Point A and Point B, but the band is going to make sure you reach the end of your violent journey with a bloodied nose and two black eyes. Jarring and discordant guitar riffs crunch their ways back and forth like two pugilists in a ring. Mark Trombino’s drums sound off like a gunfight in an abandoned Southwestern ghost town. The bass drives it all home with pulsing and thrashing noise keeping the rhythm from tottering over the edge into oblivion.
I ran into Drive Like Jehu on accident. A guy working the counter (who would later play bass for alcohol infused rock band Planes Mistaken for Stars) at my local record store recommended them when I told him I was getting tired of The Get Up Kids. I was instantly hooked and would soon go on a campaign to ravage any band of their ilk. Unfortunately for me Drive Like Jehu had already been broken up for two years at the time, but this only aided in my appreciation for what the band did for a lot of music in the Midwest where I was from.
Drive Like Jehu reunited for some reunion shows from 2014 to 2016. They’ve got on in age but haven’t lost a step. They still fucking slay and haven’t lost any of the energy that made them such an important band.
The band only has two releases and usually I would wail at the injustice that such an important band has so little material. That being said, both of their records are so indelibly important to so many bands you may listen to today that any more releases than the two they have would almost be too much.
Buried Treasure is a semi-regular feature that explores some hidden musical gems – the rare and forgotten B-sides, covers, hidden tracks, live versions and alternative takes that deserve some recognition.
I don’t remember how I first heard of The Nerines. They were from Palmy, and fit within a punk/indie scene. I saw them once playing an opening slot for Title Fight and it was super fun.
They got overshadowed when one of their members, Benny Tipene, entered on of those singing shows. Idol or X Factor or something like that… I was a fan of Benny’s and loved his folky solo work. He had a few lo-fi demo EPs up on bandcamp and they were great. He came to Wellington once to play at Mighty, Mighty, but I missed it because I had work that night. That was pre-fame days.
He ended up in the finals of the singing show, and although he didn’t win, the boosted profile did wonders for his music career. That’s the way it is in New Zealand – once you’ve been on television you’re bonafide celebrity until the wind changes. One of the pop anthems he wrote soundtracked Coca-Cola’s ad campaign that summer. I don’t begrudge him for his success, but I wish I had been able to see him play a small folk show before he blew up.
Anyway, back to The Nerines. They’re great. This song, “Owls” is my fave, due largely to the fun singalong outro.
It’s a fun tune. Strong bass lines that really stand out, bouncy drums, jangly guitars – these guys know how to play! A stop/start pre-chorus makes the chorus sound full of life and energy by comparison. And then it all cuts out.
Cue palm-muted strumming. The chant starts: “Everything looks shit in the sewer”. Talk about articulate! It just builds up and up and up – throbbing bass, then drums, than layered vocals, and soon enough the whole world is having a party. It’s so fun and you can’t help but shout along about how everything is shit but there’s no way you can actually mean it because you’re just caught up in the moment and life is so fun and this song is great and oh my, I’m out of breath, but what a ride!
This is a guest post from Aaron Edwards, better known as Foofer. Aaron has written about music for many years, getting his break on Postrockstar (where he had the weekly column Foofer Fridays), before writing for Echoes and Dust, and now Arctic Drones. He lives in Boise, Idaho with his wife and two young children, and hosted me (Joseph) when I was travelling through America in late 2017. I emailed him recently asking if he would like to tell us about any underrated bands who deserve more attention, so he graced us with his writing to promote Boise locals Midnight Legs // Marathon Lungs.
First and foremost I would love to thank Joseph for letting me come out of my cave and show him how it’s done. This past year has been crazy in a lot of ways, and I think everyone knows how easy it can be for good releases to slip under the radar or fall through the cracks. Midnight Legs // Marathon Lungs is definitely one of those. 99 times out of 100, a début album from a new band is ignored. And it only gets worse in states where the population is less than the number of cows (or potatoes). Being from my neck of the woods (which I don’t get to say very often) means that they were on my radar from day one, basically. I went to their album release show, and they were kind enough to supply me with my own copy of their CD. For weeks it was all I could play in the car. Their bandcamp page says “We’re not sad. We’re contemplative.” and it’s crazy how true it is. I’m not usually in the mood for ‘Aesthetic Medicine’ unless I’m already inside my own head, or have a long car drive ahead of me. I cannot and will not ever claim to fully understand lyrics, but I can say that I probably do more thinking due to their words moreso than their music. There’s something raw about the music that’s so appealing. There’s a very strong Slint vibe in a lot of their sound, but they also have a tendency for sounding very Post-Rock, with their bass-heavy melodies and twinkly guitars. However they don’t fall prey to post-rock pratfalls, how they do more strumming than tremolo picking. It’s a breath of fresh air for someone who’s listened almost exclusively to post-rock this past year. Imagine if Slint had made something a little more melodic and peppered it with screaming, and you’ll be close to imagining ‘Aesthetic Medicine.’
Considering that this is a début album for a local band that’s all DIY, the production is surprisingly solid. It was recorded, mixed, and mastered locally and it still sounds better than some of the local stuff that was mixed and mastered elsewhere. Even the acoustic guitar sounds how it should, I can even play it on my phone speaker and it won’t suck. Overall, I would recommend this album to all the sad bois out there. Since this release they’ve added a keyboardist, so you can look forward to another layer of depth, and another mind to add to their potential which adds up to more than the sum of their parts. It’s not exactly within my wheelhouse of music, I didn’t even think to write about them until Joseph asked me if there was anything I’d want to bring to attention from this last year. However they’re from my neighborhood. They make good music. And while it didn’t make it to my year-end list on Arctic drones, I appreciate what they’ve made and I’m excited to hear more of it.
Buried Treasure is a semi-regular feature that explores some hidden musical gems – the rare and forgotten B-sides, covers, hidden tracks, live versions and alternative takes that deserve some recognition.
The further away you get from a pivotal moment in your life, the more important it seems. Sometimes you don’t recognize the moment as being truly crucial as it is happening. It usually takes several years for the weight of it to settle in. It’s this slow passing of time that lends the moment all its lofty nostalgia. A nostalgia that fills us to the brim with terrible longing and beautiful memory. Music has a way of pinning all your best and worst memories to a page. No band did this to me more than Mineral.
The year was 1995. I was an awkward Sophomore in high school in Illinois. My mother was shopping for a birthday present for me and was apparently having difficulty in doing so. Maybe 15-year-old boys are hard to shop for. She would end up running into a guy in a record store at the mall (a fellow I would eventually become friends with) who told her to buy Diary by Sunny Day Real Estate. My mom is a conservative Midwest type and it amazes me still that she took the advice of a stranger in buying a record. I would devour this album whole. Something just clicked. It resonated with me and my extremely impressionable 15-year-old mind. Diary would change me down to my core and would set me down a road of music that, even at 38 years of age, I’ve yet to stray from.
Fast forward to 1997. My best friend Steve and I were all over the Midwest emo scene. This was before GAP got hold of the word and cheapened it. The post-hardcore scene of D.C. that was the birthplace of the sound we adored wasn’t that far in the rear view mirror. This was in the early days of the internet. Steve and I decided we’d start an online “zine”. Looking back at it now, an online “zine” in 1997 was probably a little ahead of its time. We called our little project Quagmire 9 and did music reviews, show reviews and collated all information for upcoming shows in a 100 mile radius of where we lived. Eventually we’d end up getting into the show promotion game.
Imagine 17 and 16 year old kids being able to pull in bands like Cursive and Boilermaker to a sleepy, blue collar town on the Illinois River.
All of this eventually led to a small relationship with CRANK! Records. We’d get little press packages that had all kinds of release information for bands they were distributing. This is where we would become familiar with Mineral, a relatively unknown group at the time from Austin, TX. We hopped in my 1985 Delta 88 and made the 30-minute drive across the river to CO-OP Records in East Peoria and picked up a copy of The Power of Failing, Mineral’s first album. If Diary shook me to my core, The Power of Failing would resonate with me on a biochemical scale. Every vital process of my entire being was owed to this album. I came out the other end of my first listen as something different.
Listening this album in its entirety can still elicit a plethora of feelings inside of me. A lot of my reviews right here on this wonderful site take on a theme of hopeless joy and redemption. These are concepts that I often latch onto. Looking back I would have to believe that it was lead singer Chris Simpson’s vocals that shaped my love for these ideas. The album is just full of moments where it feels as if the world may collapse in on itself, only to come up for air and become awash in the sun’s healing rays.
“Tears stream down my cheeks only to meet their redeemer and be wiped away. And there is joy.”
I’m unsure if it was the equipment used or just a lack of money for quality studio time, but The Power of Failing has one of the most incredibly raw and visceral sounds on a record that I can remember. This rough-hewn sound gives The Power of Failing an almost violent edge. It makes the melodic portions uneasy but uplifting while the more riotous and distorted parts come across as angry but supernal. It would be difficult to imagine this record with anything other than the sound it has. It’s since been remastered and it managed to retain the punch-you-in-the-gut sound that made it so absolutely brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qII7RF5rDtM
I remember trying to get all the Smashing Pumpkin and Veruca Salt kids in high school to give Mineral a chance. They just didn’t get it. The younger me couldn’t get over how they weren’t moved by what they were hearing.
Mineral’s importance to the mid-90s emo scene is undeniable. There were a lot of bands doing the Rites of Spring thing back in those days, but none of them did it with as much raw emotion as Mineral. The lyrics weren’t weighted down in hyperbole or symbolism. Chris Simpson spoke his mind and put everything in such a beautifully poetic prose. It tore at your heart and left you smiling with a sort of recognition. Pardon the cliché, but he was able to paint a picture. A picture we’ve all found ourselves in but were always bereft of the words to accurately describe it.
“And I don’t know if I should say “I’m sorry” or “Thank you”. I’ve tried to speak but the tears choke the words. And I think I finally know what they mean when they talk about joy.”
This is just part of what made Mineral so damn special. If the lyrics and vocal melodies weren’t tearing at your insides, it was the guitar, bass and drums. They just had a way of making their instruments cry in torment. I understand I’m starting to sound a little corny here, but before Mineral and bands like SDRE, guitars and rhythm played second fiddle to vocals. Listen, I was an idiot kid but Mineral opened my eyes musically to concepts, ideas and feelings that I barely knew existed.
It sounds weird but this all started with my mom. I honestly have her to thank for all of this. If she hadn’t gone against her better, more conservative judgement and bought a Sunny Day Real Estate album at the behest of some skateboarding punk kid behind a desk at a record store, none of this would have happened. Hell, I wouldn’t even be writing this. Thanks, momma.
Buried Treasure is a semi-regular feature that explores some hidden musical gems – the rare and forgotten B-sides, covers, hidden tracks, live versions and alternative takes that deserve some recognition.
Melodic hardcore band La Dispute just dropped their new track “Thirteen“, so this is a good time to shine a spotlight on some of their non-album material.
La Dispute have three EPs in the Here, Hear series that are wildly different from their regular output. Rather than the intense hardcore we are used to, these EPs include untitled experimental spoken word songs based on literature, poetry, philosophy and prose. When I saw La Dispute play with Balance & Composure in Wellington a few years ago I was delighted that they even included the song ‘Nine’ into their set by playing it as the first encore.
Setting up for recording in a garage. Picture taken from the Here, Hear II EP liner notes
The series is delightfully low-fi and creative. Most of the tracks use unconventional objects as instruments, like clapping wooden blocks together in a basement. Other examples that stood out as interesting were using a pocketknife as a guitar slide, flipping book pages, or using a pencil sharpener for percussion. You can even hear a dog howling in the song “Seven”.
They draw on a variety of literary sources for inspiration, such as Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic Annabel Lee, and Kenneth Grahame’s charming The Wind in The Willows. My favourite though, is the song ‘Eight’, adapted from the afterword of J. Michael Straczynski’s graphic novel Midnight Nation.
Written in the form of a diary reflection, Straczynski explores the dichotomies of his city, with the characters that feature during the day and during the night seemingly from two different worlds. This theme provides the basis for the graphic novel, a story of the lost and forgotten trying to find their way out from beneath the cracks of society.
I love listen to this track through headphones as I go for walks. I picture the narrators story as I explore my city, and try to see the places I’ve walked through hundreds of times with fresh eyes, trying to notice the hidden and forgotten.
Go and listen to Here, Hear seriesto fall in love with the blend of brilliant music and literature.
otomies of his city, with the characters that feature during the day and during the night seemingly from two different worlds. This theme provides the basis for the graphic novel, a story of the lost and forgotten trying to find their way out from beneath the cracks of society.