Safety - "Curses"

You know this story. Almost a decade ago, the blaze of energy that ska’s third wave brought to mainstream rock in the 1990s came to an end. The subgenre bands it bore, while popular for a short time, eventually abandoned the dancehall/barroom personality in favor of more streamlined sounds. Ska-core seemingly merged with emo, resulting in an oversaturation of hard-edged metal-influenced punk in most mainstream and underground scenes. Ska punk devolved into modern pop punk. Ska itself, with few exceptions, simply disappeared from rock “relevancy”. The ska groups that benefited from mainstream success in the nineties were either forced to accept their career twilight and continue on with a respectable cult following[i] or simply break up.[ii]

It’s strange then that bands like Safety still exist. Based in Tampa, Florida, a former pirate’s haven for ska punk, they released their first album, “Curses” independently in 2007 through Copacetic Records.[iii] Paraphrased, the album is a hodgepodge of early nineties punk and the third wave subgenres of the late nineties packed into 13 short ones.

It may sound a little basic dated, but sounding basic and out-of-date is simply collateral damage when you’re making music past its twilight. For instance, classic rock acts deal with the same quandary.

Stubbornness to change with the times will often make the music sound dated or obsolete. However, it’s important to listen to music this stubborn because it’s made by musicians who realize that the fifteen minutes of fame for this genre has come and gone. There probably isn’t going to be a fourth wave of ska.[iv] Mainstream punk doesn’t have room for true punk, and hardcore has gone as big as it is going to go. MTV doesn’t play any videos anymore, and if it did, it wouldn’t be playing this.

People who play this type of music instead of traversing the (apparently) more mature grounds of indie rock know that they are not making music for the majority.[v] They realize that there is only miniscule chance of fame. They know that there is a good chance that they are only making music for a small group of select devotees to the genre. There is an even greater chance that they are only making music for themselves. But this is why it’s important to listen.

This particular album is a scattershot of tone and fuzz. Furthermore, it’s a Rorschach of the aforementioned subgenres of third wave ska, while the bulk of the songs have as their backbone the tunes of Bad Religion in the form of full-band vocal melody, yelled choruses, and hard drums, roughly recorded with crackles present with every high and low. Interspersed are medleys of fast electric ska, disgusting guitars, and singsong acoustic mini-numbers. The acoustic guitars provide small, smooth breathers in the beginnings, middles, and ends of songs. When the band abruptly starts dropping ska strokes, either with full-bodied electric guitar or with fuzzy distortion, the result is something that resembles piano notes on the side of the stage placidly keeping everything together. All of this is thrown together into nearly every song on the album.

Basic? In the event that it still sounds that way, I apologize, and I’m sure the band would apologize too.[vi] It would be unfortunate though, because “Curses” is the first album I’ve heard in several years that happily wreaked dancehall energy on my ears and made me feel like I was drinking at Dixie Tavern. This is what made the third wave so awesome, right?

---

[i] For example, Less Than Jake spent the majority of the 2000s with major label Sire Records, and suffered from dwindling record sales until starting its own label, Sleep It Off Records in 2008. Additionally, Reel Big Fish was able to stay with Mojo Records until 2005, when the label’s failure to promote “We’re Not Happy Until You’re Not Happy” and the album’s subsequent low sales forced the band to relocate to independent Rock Ridge Music, and rely primarily on cover songs for success. Rancid is possibly an exception to this trend, as their 2003 album "Indestructible" enjoyed the highest charting and opening week sales for the band. However, the band has failed to release an album of new material in nearly six years.

[ii] See pretty much every other ska or punk band you listened to in the late nineties.

[iii] Available at http://www.copaceticrecords.com/. Safety would release a second record, an EP entitled “A Season Of Bad Dreams”, through Audible Diversion Group a year later. Available at http://www.audiblediversiongroup.com/.

[iv] However, some say that another ska revival is imminent. See Marcella Ortega, “Fourth Wave Of Ska On It’s Way”, available at http://media.www.dailylobo.com/media/storage/paper344/news/2006/06/29/Culture/Fourth.Wave.Of.Ska.On.Its.Way-2119557.shtml. Others claim that the fourth wave of ska is already here, but it is too difficult to determine whether or not it’s coming at all, most likely because of a lack of any meaningful mainstream success for the genre in the new millennium. See http://www.skapedia.com/mediawiki/index.php5?title=Fourth_Wave_Ska.

[v] The same can be said of old punk from the 1970s.

[vi] Actually, when asked to comment on whoever thinks “Curses” sounds too generic to be good, bassist Grayum Vickers said, “Blow Me.”

Braid - "Frame and Canvas"

In the early 2000’s, I played bass in a scene band. Though I was there to do some on-stage rocking, I met many people who where there for different reasons. Some wholeheartedly believed that the scene could bring them a shred of success. Of them, several were legitimately talented, while most were just there to look cool. Nevertheless, success came to virtually none of them, at least in an economic or fame sense. Because I was there primarily for the fun of it, the success angle always seemed odd to me.

Most odd of them all though were the people who thought of the scene as more than a scene. Instead, they considered it a bona fide movement of rock n’ roll. They were there to follow the “mythology” of punk and ska. A guy would once tell me, “Punk is the saving grace of Rock.” Generally, that’s a pretty accepted sentiment if applied to the 1970s. Except that this guy wasn’t talking about punk. This was 2002, and he was talking about pop punk, about Newfound Glory. “Well I will admit, their drummer can fucking rock,” I would reply.

As misplaced as that statement seems, others’ musical philosophies presented even grander notions of the scene, of ska, punk, and emo. A girl once explained to me that there is a holy trinity of emo music: “On top is The Promise Ring. Think of them as The Who of emo. To the left is Braid, they’re the Zeppelin. And on the right is Mineral, they’re emo’s Bob Dylan.”

There’s someone you’re leaving out, I thought. Sunny Day Real Estate, right? Didn’t they like invent emo or something? And that band with the fucked up picture on the album cover[1], what about those guys?

Add that to the fact that, even if that girl’s statement was accepted as true, there is no Beatles of emo, no Beach Boys of emo, and no Rolling Stones. There isn’t even a Boston.[2]

That girl may actually have been onto something though. Although she meant her manifesto as a tribute to the bands she mentioned, her need to compare them to a dynasty of rock music that existed 30 years ago is a good example of why “scenes” such as the one I was in are rarely successful, and even if successful, are generally short-lived. Though most modern music seems hell-bent on diverging from older music (often in a “hey mom and dad, let me show you what your music did wrong” sort of way), it seems just as bent on receiving acceptance and laud from the mainstream, the people that hail decades-old rock n’ roll as art and new music as nothing more than dribble.

Emo’s many problems[3] aside, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a soft spot for Promise Ring, Braid, or Mineral. The Promise Ring did have a good mix of melody and rock at a certain time. Mineral was very slow, its songs were very long and thought out, and mostly tear-jerker kind of stuff.

Braid simply rocked. And by rocked, I mean that their drummer was seriously inventive and all over the place. Its guitars were jagged, and it’s vocals were raw. I don’t know if the title “Led Zeppelin of Emo” really fits or is even deserved, but they were relatively much more Zeppelin-esque than those other two bands (or anyone else who ever played emo, really). For this, I will give that scene girl a little credit.

11 years ago, Braid released its final proper album, “Frame and Canvas”. I’m not sure if it was generally praised when it came out, because I live nowhere near Illinois. I know people in New Orleans liked it though.

To a cold, first-time listener, this album would seem confusing because it sounds nothing like “emo”. It sounds like fast-paced rock music, with inventive drums, jagged guitars, and raw vocals. “But they’re yelling, not screaming,” someone would probably say. “This music doesn’t sound emotional at all, it just sounds like loud noise music.”

That listener would have some good points, and raise questions that I probably couldn’t answer. I honestly don’t know how this band was ever categorized as emo. Only twice or thrice on the entire 12-track album does the music slow down sufficient for Bob Nanna to sing some heartstring-type stuff. All in all, the music sounds more cathartic than emotional if anything. The Motorhead of emo maybe?

There are some things I can tell the listener for certain though. There are two guitars, and they’re both using a muff of some sort[4], so that they sound like the same guitar layered over itself but playing different riffs at the same time, so it has that muddy quality like an early nineties Archers of Loaf or Pavement record.

The drums are all over the place. The band took time to write songs with many tempo changes, which the drummer takes full advantage of, and this makes the songs sound formless. The drums were recorded in such a way as to give the album sound very diegetic feel, so that the listener can hear every background noise in times of lull, and the bass drum and large tom make your sound system shake whenever a song reaches its peak.

There are two singers and they are very sloppy. There is a lot of yelling, with no high-pitched modern “screamo” screaming, and there is some singing. While the singing is off-key at many points because of the sloppiness, this album is an instance where sloppiness adds an endearing air to the music.

If there is, as the scene people from 2002 believed, a mythology to it all, then this album may serve as an artifact of what emo really was before 2000: fun, hard, and cathartic, not depressing and theatrical. Or, at the very least, there was a good mix. Most importantly, “Frame and Canvas” comes off as cool more than anything. One can’t help but view the album through a rock n’ roll lens, of broken guitars and smoky bars and badass tour vans.

For this reason, one could also argue that this album wasn’t really a representation of emo at all, rather it was just a one-off exception of an album made by Braid, whose other albums are much more “emo” than “Frame and Canvas”.[5]

On the other hand, “Frame and Canvas” is the only album for which any one remembers Braid (or even Hey Mercedes). Furthermore, most people just remember The Promise Ring for that song “Why Did We Ever Meet”, and no one really remembers Mineral at all.

---

[1] Rites of Spring

[2] Though I think most emo bands could qualify as the Boston, since the vast majority of them were good for only one album.

[3] Ranging from its name to the image associated with it.

[4] Or it could just be the amps they were using. Either way, the guitars are given a very early 90s sound.

[5] In fact, immediately after breaking up at the end of the 1990s, the band would continue as Hey Mercedes, a much more poppy, emotional version of itself.

Fun Lovin' Criminals - "100% Colombian"

‘Tis amazing, if not annoying, the importance of cultivating one’s image. In life, your modus operandi is to make yourself look like a hard worker, but that the ability to work hard comes effortlessly. In modern music (and in all of modern art to a certain extent), the point is to make it all look effortless, in a vague and sludgy teeter towards defining what is “cool”.

Those who claim to be oblivious to the imbalance between hard work and image in the music industry (i.e., “I just listen to the music. I don’t get into all the other stuff.”) are liars. Those who acknowledge it, but claim that it doesn’t bother them are not to be trusted.

Sometimes though, rarely, image is fun, not pretentious. A musician, in a kind-of-Warhol fashion, legitimately makes his image important to what is important about his music. And it doesn’t come off as forced, but as necessitated by what he aims to tell the audience. It’s actually cool.

This exception is what makes a band like the Fun Lovin’ Criminals so rewarding to listen to. In the mid-90s, they received moderate attention, mostly a product of the Tarantino influenced ultra violence movement in film. Fun Lovin’ Criminals had a small hit, “Scooby Snacks”, which heavily sampled Reservoir Dogs and dealt with robbing banks on drugs.

Their pseudo-Mafioso personalities failed to take them much further than that, however. In 1998, they released “100% Colombian” to virtually no critical or commercial acknowledgement.

After listening to the album in its entirety, the most obvious question is, “how much of this stuff was sampled?”

The answer is, “not a whole lot.” With the exception of “Big Night Out”, which borrows its chorus from Tom Petty and its ending from the Marshall Tucker Band, virtually all of the album is, as the liner notes claim, “written, performed, and recorded by Fun Lovin’ Criminals”, three professional musicians from New York.

For all Huey Morgan’s lyrics, which overwhelmingly revolve around drugs, prostitutes, broken dreams, and people getting their faces smashed in, the sheer professional musicianship on this album leads one to seriously doubt that Huey, or any of the members of this band have firsthand experience with the aforementioned topics.

Nevertheless, the atmospherics of “100% Colombian”, the seamless flow from lounge jazz to funky blues to heavy rock, make Morgan’s subdued but comically over-the-top rapping more endearing than would usually exist in nature.

Clearly, this is a band that relies heavily on the romanticism of New York crime life for its own image; just look at these guys.

If a black and white picture in Central Park with thin moustaches and goatees and the wifebeater showing beneath the tattoo-artist button down bowling shirt isn’t an attempt to look cool, I don’t know what is. Nevertheless, an question you might ask is, “Where are they now?”; or even better, “Why aren’t they still around?”

The answer is that they are still around, but not really. They have a huge following in the U.K., which apparently digs its caricaturist portrayal or New York City’s criminal underground. Because of this little nest egg, they’ve made absolutely no attempt to reconnect with American audiences since 1998. But why haven’t they tried to become relevant again?

They had an opportunity in the 2000s with the rap-metal craze. It really wouldn’t have taken a whole lot of effort to end up on a tour with Kid Rock or someone like that. It would have taken even less effort to collaborate with one of those bands. Furthermore, America's Mafia-fascination never fully went away, as “The Sopranos” demonstrated.

Regardless of the popularity of the Sopranos, remaining relevant on the American music scene most probably would have required that the Fun Lovin’ Criminals re-cultivate their image, form it and mold it in a way that would have made their music more palatable to the listening public.

Given that they were so willing to build a ridiculous "supercool" image, which was leagues from their real personalities, in the mid-90s, wouldn’t they be willing to rebuild it in the 2000s?

It would seem that the answer should be “yes”. However, it isn’t. The clearer answer to this question, as well as to why they never even attempted to regain any relevance, is simply that the Fun Lovin’ Criminals are hard-working professional musicians.

That’s pretty fucking cool when you think about it.