[mp3] falling down the stairs

Even As We Speak - "Falling Down The Stairs" (mp3 on EAWS website)

Even As We Speak were the first Sarah band that I ever heard, though "Best Kept Secret" was considerably less glossy than this. What I love is the single loud bass note that sounds in the middle of the second line of the song. I don't know if it's a mixing mistake or what, but it sounds great-- and then it never recurs in the rest of the song no matter how fervently I expect it.

EAWS, I should mention, did the first folky female-vocal cover of "Bizarre Love Triangle" that I know of, in 1987. Devine + Statton released theirs in 1989, and not until 1993 did the one everyone knows by Frente! come out. I don't actually remember if theirs was good; their new web page claims a compilation of all 17 pre-Sarah songs may come out soon, which would include it.

Later today, if I have time: the first-- and only!-- emo band that ever existed.

[mp3] smile will get you through the week, laugh will never get you through the day

The Protoculture - "Driving A Stolen Car On A Borrowed Road" (mp3)
The Protoculture - "My New Laugh" (mp3)

As promised, the first and only emo band.

My logic here is that "emo" was stripped of significance by strange cultural forces, to wit: a whole lot of people started hearing it without knowing what it referred to. Everyone made up their own theories. Around 2000 you could have said it at least had a consensus meaning, but by now, forget it. At the same time, it manifestly no longer means what it meant back in the heyday of Gravity Records, when it was unquestionably definable.

Using science, however, I have determined that for part of the summer of 1997, these two forces balanced each other out just enough that an observer of today can refer to things from that period as "emo" without being engulfed in a howling semiotic vortex. So there.

"My New Laugh" has been one of my favorite rock songs ever since that August, when it appeared in the radio station's mail. The band seem to really like abrupt volume switches, but 'quiet' and 'loud' seem to correspond to this mysterious opposition between smiling and laughing instead of to the cliched "tranquil"/"aggressive".

The Protoculture only ever put out two seven-inches that I saw; this, and one about a year later. If memory serves, they were catalog numbers 1 and 2 from "State Of The Art Records", and the mailorder address on them was somewhere in Nebraska. That's all I know. If the web has any information on them, it's being drowned out by Robotech webpages and other bands who've used the name.