Band Write Up: We Were Skeletons

Appears at http://www.nationalunderground.org/news/bands-you-need-to-know/451-bands-you-need-to-know-we-were-skeletons

If Ampere decided to find some middle-ground between having a regular tempo and no discernible tempo at all, the result might have been remarkably similar to We Were Skeletons, a chaotic three-piece screamo band from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The band adds a mathy twist to many of their songs, and it’s always smartly integrated, briskly played, and typically utilized as a series of transitions into angry, full-on blasts or subdued moments of restraint. Dual vocals often overlap in a tag-team manner reminiscent of early Twelve Hour Turn.

Over the span of their nine-song self-titled sophomore LP, which came out last year, We Were Skeletons demonstrate a remarkable talent for holding the listener’s attention through one dynamic shift to another, and song lengths range from two to seven minutes. The immense “This Destroys Us” features super intricate guitar work that progressively takes shape alongside a percussion-heavy rhythm that breaks down as quickly as it picks back up, and that’s just the first thirty seconds.

Currently signed to Topshelf Records, We Were Skeletons have released a split EP with MNWA, and subsequently released a split with The Saddest Landscape last April. The band recently wrapped up a U.S. Tour, and will be playing the Fest this October. Stream We Were Skeletons at Topshelf's Bandcamp page here!

Rain and Sweat

The House of Vans in Brooklyn has hosted several free shows this summer. I’m not sure how they do it, to be honest. The place is formally a skate park, renovated to temporarily accommodate a large stage. There’s a barrier, as well, with no-nonsense security tossing out crowd surfers without a single warning. But hey, not my problem. The strictly enforced no-crowd-surfing rule is completely understandable considering the cost of entry, and I imagine it’s somewhat necessary in combating the inevitably shitty result of having offered free beer. The combination of alcohol and flying bodies is surely a recipe for destructive rowdiness.

I showed up at four PM last week to secure my spot in line for Against Me!. Against Me! were opening for Tokyo Police Club, for whom I did not stick around, but they played a lengthy set, regardless. My dad, sister, and sister’s friend sought food, drinks, and a bathroom while I held our spot. They returned shortly thereafter with a slice of pizza for me. Unfortunately, the rain picked up at about ten minutes 'til doors. We got soaked, me in particular, as wetness clung between my skin and a sticky flannel shirt. I dried off eventually, but enduring the rain was unpleasant. In all my years of waiting in lines, I’ve actually never encountered it, so that was a first. House of Vans employees sold ponchos at the last minute, but by then it was too late, and there was no point. They finally started to let us in at 6:30.

RSVPing, which we all did, was recommended prior to the show, but it turned out to be pretty unnecessary, as the line filtered into the building without so much as an ID check. Perhaps the lack of formality was in part due to the rain, but I’d also heard of people having very little amount of trouble getting in. They allowed entry up until a certain level of capacity. I believe that most people, assuming they endured at least some of the rain, managed to get in. There was plenty of space. My sister and I ended up in the second row facing stage left and some poorly-placed amps that blocked some of the view onstage.

The openers were remarkably awful. I’ve heard good things about Japanther, but the telephones-for-microphones gimmick and garage rock mediocrity did little more than bore me. Boredom, however, turned out to be among the least of my concerns, as it transcended into uncomfortable, horrified embarrassment when Big Freedia emerged alongside four backup dancers and a DJ. Big Freedia is a Brooklyn-based, flamboyantly gay “rap” artist whose performances feature unsightly, gratuitous amounts of rear-end gyrations that culminate in a volunteer-based “booty battle” to the tune of the self-explanatory “Azz Everywhere.” The songs themselves were comprised of so many repetitive loops that it became, at one point, totally nauseating, both audibly and visually.

Against Me! more than made up for that horrendous display, invigorating the crowd with the first decent thing they’d heard all night. They somehow squeezed eighteen songs into fifty-five minutes, pausing only to thank the crowd and the venue. It's truly astonishing how tight they’ve become. The set was incredibly well-rehearsed and professional, yet it somehow appeared to be equally casual and joyous. The band is clearly having the most fun they’ve had in years, and that unbridled enthusiasm undoubtedly descended to the crowd, climaxing with the ever-impassioned “We Laugh at Danger and Break all the Rules.” I left the show with Black Crosses on CD, a smile, and yet another soaked t-shirt.

Listening to Toby Keith, Brokencyde, and Japanese Electro-Pop Does Not Make You Cool

For a lot of people, there’s a strange reverence for having what they deem a “diverse” taste in music. In my small world, this is best exemplified by a particular application that analyzes one's statistics on Last FM in order to measure such a thing. I can’t specify how it actually works, but it calculates the number of similar artists in one’s music library. The “similar artists” feature on Last FM itself is not necessarily a foolproof, definitive determination, but it’s also surprisingly adequate. If, on a large scale, users tend to listen to band X along with band Y, then band Y is categorized as a similar artist of band X, and vice versa. Sure, the similarity of users is more closely examined than the similarity of the bands themselves, but is the idea of a feature analyzing and comparing specific musical characteristics actually plausible? I don’t think that it is, and further, it isn’t necessary. The current feature is helpful, regardless.

There exist groups of Last FM users who proudly boast of their eclectic tendencies, but I don’t feel that they are somehow more enlightened or more open-minded than the rest of us. That being said, I would certainly describe my own personal taste as “diverse,” but I don’t view that as some indicator of my musical know-how, hipness, or creativity. The listeners who comprise the aforementioned groups often display or express a hubristic sense of pride, a sentiment that’s reaffirmed by a brainless and flawed application that plainly tells them something along the lines of “Congratulations! Your music taste is EXTREMELY DIVERSE. Keep discovering new bands!”

What, then, does it actually mean to have “diverse” taste? If I listened to Toby Keith, Brokencyde, and some foreign electro-pop band that I discovered in a Japanese anime, I’d have diverse taste. If all of my favorite bands occupied a single scene or sub-genre, I wouldn’t. The former, however, is not more virtuous than the latter. It’s probably fair to assume that the one who trumpets Toby Keith, Brokencyde, and the electro-pop band is actually flat-out clueless.

A “narrow-minded” taste doesn’t at all speak of a listener’s musical exploration. In fact, it may do the opposite. If I listen to Elliott Smith, for example, it’s only logical that I seek out Bright Eyes. I don’t have to like Bright Eyes, but there’s no harm in at least looking into him. I should look into him. I’ve never quite understood people who resent a particular artist for sounding too similar to an artist they already like. I don’t expect new artists to top or match the artists they’re often trying to emulate, but that doesn’t mean that the supposed subpar versions are completely devoid of merit or potential. This might technically be a "narrow-minded" approach, but so what? I enjoy discovering bands whose characteristics make them reminiscent of bands I already listen to, but that doesn't mean that I'm opposed to everything outside of that particular frame.

Now, I’m not in any way implying that a rigid musical focus is somehow superior. To be fair, I enjoy Converge, Tegan and Sara, and Matt and Kim, none of whom sound anything alike, and I’d like to think that that’s a more respectable selection than one consisting of Escape the Fate, Avenged Sevenfold, and that wave of cheesy hair-metal revival (But to each his own. That’s hardly the extreme when it comes to awful trends). In this example, diversity trumps consistency, but that’s never an unwavering rule.

The conclusion I’ve reached is that diversity is essentially irrelevant to “good” or “bad” taste. Rather, it’s completely neutral. It is simply the bands themselves that determine those qualitative decisions, and even then, there’s the whole aspect of subjectivity that comes into play, as painful as it is to admit that Insane Clown Posse has appeal. Not to me, obviously.