maybe we’ll catch fire

bands i wished i’d liked at the time

Sorry for the wait! I was feeling a little exhausted in the aftermath of my output last month--which, though this just highlights how infrequently I've been posting, was still six times my regular productivity--and I was busy with a few other things, primarily working a little more than usual, going out to Las Vegas to visit my parents, and playing the new Spider-Man game, which according to my PlayStation I'm about 38% of the way done with and so far is perhaps the best superhero game I've personally ever played. (In fairness, I've mostly just played Batman and Spider-Man games my whole life.) I'm also almost done, finally, with the second Danganronpa game, which I've become embarrassingly emotionally invested in.

I read a book analyzing the various relationships between women, true crime, and obsessive behavior, called Savage Appetites, by Rachel Munroe, and it was an extremely compelling and well-written complement and counterpoint to my "Gory Details" post from last month (and has actually induced a bit of imposter syndrome on my part--always a mark of high recommendation). I have some borrowed books I need to finish reading, about Swedish death metal and Finnish death metal (thanks to David Anthony) and about the making of the original Ghostbusters (thanks to my little brother). I promise I read works of real literature and serious critical analysis too... just not lately.

I'm waiting a little bit for my The Cure-induced hangover to wear off before I dive back in for the back half (! that's only four albums over the course of about 30 years!) of their career with my upcoming pieces about Wild Mood Swings, Bloodflowers, The Cure, and 4:13 Dream. And in the meantime, I've found myself, in an odd twist of fate, hopelessly addicted to Alkaline Trio.

It's odd, because to be quite honest, Alkaline Trio just weren't one of those bands for me growing up. I had different gateway bands into punk as a genre, and when it came to Chicago punk or booze-addled orgcore, I was always more into The Lawrence Arms or Hot Water Music. Hell, even if we're talking about morbid, goth-inflected pop-punk/post-hardcore, I always gravitated more towards My Chemical Romance, who I maintain are probably the best band to come from that entire mainstream pop-emo explosion in the mid-2000s. But more and more lately I've been convinced that, maybe, Alkaline Trio belong right up there too.

I'm aware that I'm pretty late on coming around to the Trio in a meaningful way. Like every other fourteen-year-old into punk music at any point in the last 25ish years, I heard Goddamnit! and was blown away, but mostly wrote off their other material. It felt like it sort of descended into a samey muck that made it difficult to distinguish one song from another. Even when I was living in Chicago and drinking heavily in my early college days, the perfect conditions under which one would fall in love with the band, I was more interested in Discordance Axis, Turnstile, and Kendrick Lamar than early 2000s pop-punk.

Many of the most musically knowledgeable people in my life, however, were way ahead of me on this curve, though-- David Anthony (who has a whole damn podcast about them), Rosa of Clavel and For Your Health, and my goddamn wife have all been effusive in their praise of Alkaline Trio's early work and displayed some bewilderment about my utter ignorance of it. In fairness to them, they do seem like a band that I would have gravitated towards in my middle school years: fatalistic self-destructive lyrics; macabre metaphors and aesthetics; vague provocations against organized religion; excellent bass lines. And I did always like Goddamnit!, particularly "Clavicle," which I've put on more than one mixtape. (Along with the first two tracks off Dorkrockcorkrod--IYKYK.)

But it does also make an odd sort of sense that I find myself more attuned to their frequency now that I'm older, am happily married, rarely drink, and listen to a lot less of the emo and pop-punk that defined much of my adolescence. Alkaline Trio, particularly their early work, have a few ineffable qualities that make them stand out from the pack, chief among them being Matt Skiba's throat-scraping scream, which is so sonically and emotionally powerful that it can give you whiplash when he unleashes it at the right moment. It's so good that when you listen to his work in blink-182 and then go back to a song like "Cooking Wine" or "Sleepyhead" it actually induces something akin to a dissociative fury. Part of the reason Skiba's voice and singing style is so much smoother now is, of course, due to medical issues and at least one surgery resulting from not taking care of his voice properly, so it's a little unfair to want those screams back, but it's hard not to feel that way when you're hit in the face with its upfront, visceral quality on their older material.

The other aspect that separates early Trio from much of the rest of the pack is their songwriting. Though not quite as dynamic as My Chemical Romance (sorry to keep drawing the comparison, since they really are very very different bands, but they're the closest aesthetic analogue and easily my favorite band of that scene and era), Alkaline Trio's songs were just straightforward enough to be satisfying verse-chorus punk songs, but with enough offbeat structural irregularities to still be interesting to listen to long after the first time you hear them. Alkaline Trio's bridges are routinely the best parts of their songs, Dan Andriano's bass work rarely follows the same patterns from beginning to end, and particularly in the Goddamnit!/Maybe I'll Catch Fire years, there's the occasional hint of dissonance in Skiba's guitar work that hearkens back to his influences from the Midwest noise rock bands of the Touch & Go and Amphetamine Reptile ilk, particularly US Maple, whom he has name-checked lyrically.

Their closest siblings in this regard are clearly The Lawrence Arms, who also revel in the "meat and potatoes with a few pinches of spice" approach, but where Brendan Kelly and Chris McCaughan are dirtbag intellectual gutter poet laureates, Matt Skiba and Dan Andriano are painfully earnest lyricists, who occasionally tip straight into "too much" territory, and that's actually part of their appeal. Even a song as, to put it bluntly, whiny and embarrassing as "Enjoy Your Day" has a sort of endearingly sloppy charm to it that elevates it beyond what would otherwise be self-serious and un-playful. It also lends the band a wounded vulnerability, which is helpful when you're singing about getting your heart broken, because it's far too easy to come off as misogynist. You don't get that issue much with Alkaline Trio. I love Senses Fail, but in 2003, they were singing about killing their girlfriends just like so many other post-hardcore/metalcore/pop-punk bands at the time; Matt Skiba was singing about his girlfriend killing him. It might seem like it doesn't make a difference, but I say it's the difference that makes it.

Speaking of songs about murder, Alkaline Trio's more occult inclinations are definitely also part of the appeal, often striking a balance between the cute schlock of The Misfits and the genuinely creepy psychosexual lyrical imagery of, well, Danzig-era Misfits; it wouldn't be a stretch to call them Misfits by way of Jawbreaker. Skiba also spikes much of the band's early work with a cheeky brand of Satanism that soundsLaveyan, and looks theistic. Many of the band's stated non-punk influences tend more towards the goth, industrial, and neofolk ends of the spectrum--they even have a Death In June feature on Agony & Irony--but I'd be surprised to learn that there's no metal in Skiba's musical diet, what with his penchant for 666 and inverted crosses and pentagrams. After all, there's a feature from black metal/dark ambient/synthpop/chamber orchestra freaks Ulver on Agony & Irony as well.

The only contemporaries of Alkaline Trio I can think of who successfully mixed punk/hardcore with goth affectations and fake-blood-drenched campy stage theatrics without descending into unmoored mawkishness (and who, importantly, actually wrote good songs) were, of course, My Chemical Romance, who were definitely influenced by Alkaline Trio, as well as AFI, who seemed to exhibit some sort of convergent thinking, as they started to take a big turn in that direction around 1997 and 1998 with Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Eyes and the A Fire Inside EP, which was around the same time that the Trio were releasing their earliest EPs and Goddamnit! I think it would be reasonable of me to assume that, aside from the obvious Misfits and mid-era TSOL influences, the legendary Ink & Dagger left a mark on all three bands; they broke up just before the others had their mainstream breakthroughs. The pain of being ahead of your time is real. (Drive This Seven-Inch Wooden Stake Through My Philadelphia Heart and The Fine Art of Original Sin should be required listening for anyone even marginally into both DIY hardcore/adjacent music and horror movies.)

But while Alkaline Trio would grow more bold with their spookiness throughout the early 2000s--wearing demon-possession eye contacts on their album covers, the entirety of the Halloween at the Metro live DVD, writing a song about the Manson Family's "Sexy Sadie"--they played it a little closer to the vest on earlier material, and the result is pop-punk that feels just a bit "off" in an extremely satisfactory way. The small amount of pre-Dan Andriano material--"Sundials," "'97," "Weak Week"--while definitely still good, is a little flat. This is probably due to inexperience and lack of confidence, as it was the first time Skiba had moved out from behind the drum kit of bands like Jerkwater to front a group of his own.

By the time of the For Your Lungs Only EP, they'd grown into a shockingly melodically sophisticated act, with Andriano's more Promise Ring-indebted vocal approach complementing Skiba's emotional bulimia quite well on the insistently menacing throb of the title track, and adding just the right amount of levity to the absolutely lacerating "Cooking Wine." The addition of Andriano also highlights what a firecracker rhythm section the band had, as the bass and drums would often steal the show from Skiba's guitar work--though it certainly has its interesting and creative moments (the bridge of "Cringe" comes to mind immediately), it can generally be described as workmanlike. The guitar actually does much of the rhythmic propulsion in Trio songs, leaving the bass and drums to creatively paint within that space.

This all comes to something of a head on Goddamnit!, and there are few debut LPs that inspire this level of fanatical devotion in the world of punk. The amount of people who desperately wish Alkaline Trio would write another Goddamnit! nearly rivals the amount of people who desperately long for the days of The Blue Album and Pinkerton. The saddest part is, much like Weezer, Alkaline Trio are essentially incapable of doing so. Not only could they simply never hope to capture that moment in time again, the fact that they have gotten traditionally "better" at songwriting over time necessarily precludes them from the sort of adolescent recklessness that is at the heart of much of what makes Goddamnit! so compelling. Since it was recorded in a measly five days (and Dan Andriano left to tour with Tuesday halfway through that process--thanks for the info, David) the whole affair has a frantic and desperate quality to it that bleeds into the lyrical conceits and vice versa.

Goddamnit! is probably in the top 5 best breakup records ever recorded, so it makes sense that people would become emotionally attached to it beyond all rationality. It's why people forgive it "Enjoy Your Day." (Seriously, that song is ridiculous.) But it makes sense, because the songs perfectly articulate that intangible discomfort and pain that comes with being so lovelorn at such an awkward age. "San Francisco" is probably the best example, a midtempo stomp of an anthem about drowning your sorrows where it's palpably obvious that the narrator is simply drinking because he thinks that's what he's supposed to do in times like this. The record is full of moments of endearingly earnest confusion like this, even when it's melded with Schwarzenbachian wit, like the "crack my head open on your kitchen floor to prove to you that I have brains" line from standout "Nose Over Tail." The common dismissal lobbied against Alkaline Trio is that they're simply the Tim Burton remake of Jawbreaker, but Jawbreaker would never deign to include a sentiment so naked as the suicide rumination "Trouble Breathing" without couching it in layers of irony and metaphor (see: "Save Your Generation").

Any attempts at irony on Goddamnit! are curtailed by sheer existential ennui and caffeinated catharsis, and any wordplay is in direct service to the central emotional thrust of the songs. "Southern Rock" is a song about going to hell that barely even remembers to be metaphorical. "Cop" is a two-and-a-half-minute roast of power-tripping cops that calls the titular cop a "fatso." "Clavicle" couldn't be any more guilelessly thirsty if it tried. I think this, more than anything, is why people cling to it so closely--there are so few records that are so uncomfortably authentic in their emotions without sacrificing accessibility and song craft, and fewer still that are alsouncompromisingly aggressive aesthetically. (There's two sappy acoustic songs here, sure, but everyone's entitled to two.)

There's really nowhere to go from there but darker, and you can see that transition in full effect on the I Lied My Face Off EP: songs are longer and bleaker in tone; lyrics are even more depressive and self-crucifying without sacrificing their underlying black humor; the performances are tinged with a tad more cynicism and bitterness. Binge-drinking is turning into alcoholism, sadness and anger are inescapable, and they're getting more sexually frustrated by the day--all that is getting channeled into music that's getting just a bit more complex and slightly heavier. Lyrically things are getting a touch more sophisticated as well, although there are still some all-time clunkers. Unfortunately, the two worst offenders are both from Andriano songs: "No one's your equal because you're the queen of pain" from "This Is Getting Over You" and "I made a mess, like watching newborn babies crack from work-related stress" from the title track. (Now that I think about it, the latter wraps right back around to being kinda awesome, especially because it's delivered in such a tightly-coiled, mean-sounding thudder of a song.) For Skiba's part, "Bleeder" would probably end up becoming the most enduring non-album Alk3 song, which can partially be attributed to Hot Water Music's stellar cover.

Maybe I'll Catch Fire continues in much the same mold, and as a result is overall the darkest, messiest, and most noisy and fractured Alkaline Trio record. As I'm sure you can guess, it's also my favorite (and I think their most criminally-underrated). Sure, "Radio" has its well-earned status of monster anthem and frequent set closer (and "shaking like a dog shitting razor blades" is probably the best and most vividly disturbing opening line Skiba has ever penned), but I think "Fuck You Aurora" is just as anthemic and deserves to be spoken of in the same breath. "Sleepyhead" gets my vote for maybe the single most underrated Alkaline Trio song; it's violent, creepy, loud, and actively uncomfortable to listen to in the best way, and those throat-shredding vocals are just incredible.

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-xoxo, Ellie