Bands you loved that faded away • Page 97

Spitalfield & The Junior Varsity are doing a small run together!

 

Special guest Eugene Levy, eh?

 

the midwest pop punk band, yes

 

Oh

 

RIP Steve of Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start. Loved this band.

Steve Poponi Obituary, Audubon NJ, Up Up Down Down Left Right Band vocalist and guitarist has died

 

damn, i loved them too

 

Oh fuck this sucks

 

spitalfield is touring the great white north if you are up there, GO SEE THEM!!!

 

Dang what a show. 1.5 hr drive....hm hm

 

Gravity Kills is doing a show this month, and I would commit crimes if we could ever get them to make a new album.

 

Just ripped Dead Poetic’s 2004 album “New Medicines.” What the fuck. Criminally underrated… in a universe where Underoath/HH didn’t drop at the same time, these guys would’ve been massive. What an album.

 

Yeah it's pretty solid

 

I loved that album so, so, so much when it dropped. Apparently it was absolute hell on the band in the recording process and ultimately one of the lead-ins to their dissolution (which also had a lot to do with why they went in an entirely different direction for Vices). Brandon’s vocal range on that record is absolutely insane and the songs are so catchy. It’ll forever have a special place in my heart and I always felt it was severely underrated as well.

 

Oh wow… I had no idea about the recording process. They’ve always felt so secretive to me. I 100% agree… even at 17… I was like holy shit this guys range is massive, and so, so clean. I feel like they were pigeonholed into the genre but they were never meant to be there to begin with. I don’t know… there’s just something there that’s entirely different than what they were living amongst.

 

yessss this album rules. guess I know what I'm listening to tonight

 

say anything

 

Yeah, Brandon hated the whole screamo genre and didn’t want to be pigeonholed, which is why Vices abandoned the screaming altogether. I can’t find the interview now, but I remember reading years ago about how the recording process of New Medicines destroyed friendships and led to the implosion of the band, which then led to the reformation of the band with new members for Vices…which then led to their undoing entirely thereafter. I believe certain members had wanted to continue the path they were on for New Medicines while Brandon didn’t and there were a bevy of creative differences in the studio and the recording process was very long and grueling. I did find this quote from Brandon about their implosion after New Medicines was finished:

The high point of our bands success was in 2004 with the release of New Medicines. This was the worst year of my life. My band was falling apart, causing me to lose two of my best friends, Chad and Josh. In hindsight, friendship was much more important than any progression of our band. The right thing to do would have been to call it quits before New Medicines ever happened - this would have saved me, and them, a tremendous amount of grief. I have to live with it, I suppose.

After the mess of 2004. I was out of breath.

I was exhausted. I had nothing left, except for a love for creating music. Creating music-- Not leaving home for months at a time, not dealing with contract negotiations, not living in a van, not any of the other complications that this love of mine has brought. Just creating music. The feeling of creating a song that you are happy with, and one that expresses what you were feeling at that time - that's what I'm in love with. This love has proven to be one that will remain with me for the rest of my life.

 

Well I did manage to find this from an old HM Magazine interview in 2006:

"Right around the time of New Medicines, things just started to get a little weird." This is vocalist Brandon Rike explaining the situation. "We kind of realized, 'You're just with people because you've always been with people. Your personalities might not necessarily gel very well. You realize you've developed into extremely different people and wouldn't be together if it wasn't for the fact you started a band together."

All this right when they were recording the record that would make the band known - right after takeoff. That record was New Medicines.

Before that, it was just a high school band. A thing they did on week-ends. Next thing they know, Tooth and Nail is at their door. Next thing they know, they're signed and have a label pushing their record. Next thing they know, they're not the same people anymore.

RIKE: That's when we realized things were getting a little tough. ...New Medicines was a really good record, but (we) had so much internal stuff, we had to take care of that before we started pushing that record. Things just started to fall apart around the Fall of 2004. That was kind of the point in time when I could have honestly said to you that Dead Poetic has broken up. Straight up. Done.

ME: With no plans of continuing?

RIKE: With no plans of continuing.

For better or for worse, Rike knew that at that point it was no longer just him. If it was just a high school thing - if it was just him and his now former band mates - he could have made a clean break. But now, he wasn't the only one on board. "New Medicines" had become a hit. Now, there were some odd 50,000-100,000 people who had bought their records and come to their shows. Breaking up would mean leaving them stranded. "Our fans dedication to our band is the single reason that we decided to keep it going." Rike, like most people, understood that it would be easier to save some face - to save some friendship - if they could just call it quits and stop things. He understood that some very drastic changes would have been needed to even begin to continue on with the band.

He understood that making those changes would be hard. But he also knew that with all the fans in tow, he couldn't abandon the things he'd done, the band he'd created, the things he'd written that inspired and touched people. And that, to him, was worth more than walking away.

RIKE: And then you feel a pressure and a - maybe a responsibility to those kids who
bought your record. Our fans dedication to our band is the single reason that we decided to keep it going. That says a lot for our fans. Dude, we haven't put out a record since April of 2004, and we've still got these fans that are just stoked on our band. I see Myspace comments that say, 'Dude we just got your new album! It's awesome!' And I'm like, You mean the new album that was released two years ago?'

ME: It's been two years, and people are still buying your record, thinking it's brand new. That, and your core fans are still listening to it.

RIKE: It's so heart-warming and humbling— these kids are just into it. They don't care about any drama or anything like that that we have, they just want to see us play.

So Rike could either go through the struggle of fixing what was wrong, or give it up and leave it all behind—so he tore it down, and began the process of rebuilding. The band was broken down to its core, himself and guitarist Zach Miles; Rike still prefers not to expand on the inner-workings what exactly happened. But with a little help from some friends, Dead Poetic - version 2.0 - was conceived. "I think Jesse Sprinkle called me up and said, 'Hey man, I heard about your situation and I'm here for you,'" Rike explains. "And then shortly after that, Dusty Redmond - after Beloved broke up - called and said, 'Dude, do you guys still need another guitarist?' … We soon had our first little jam thing together up in New York - and it just gels, man."

Redmond had been singing the praises of former Beloved bass player John Brehm, and they brought him in to play. "We rang him the next time we got together - it was probably about a month later - and he just fit in," Rike says.

"It was perfect. It was just fun. Everything just came together. Everything just worked. I thought, 'This is the five guys I want to pursue this band with. This is the perfect line-up for what I want to do, and for what we want to do.'" It was finally invigorating. It was finally refreshing. It was finally the Dead Poetic Rike had envisioned. "This is the type of music we love, the type we want to play... and the kind of music we love differs greatly from the record that 'New Medicines' was." So what do you do when you've built an empire on a genre you don't feel apart of? How do you get away? Dead Poetic had gracefully slid by word of mouth, by a stroke of unfortunate luck, by a massive trend - into the depths of a genre who's name Rike sounds like he doesn't even want to say out loud. And now, he has a completely different band. He realized he's finally writing music he absolutely loves, the music he grew up on, the music that inspired him - music entirely different from what the band's public currently knows them as: 'screamo.'

"We were writing our first record, 'Four Wall Blackmail,'" Rike says, "we were sitting there mixing that record watching MTV2 and a band called Thursday pops on the screen. And I'd never heard of this band before. I was like, 'Dang it. This is what's about to happen in music right now.'"

And Rike was very right. So right, in fact, they created a word for it; screamo was born. Bands with no screamo intentions got lumped into the genre. It snowballed into a force of emo proportions. It became a bad word.

"I don't want to talk cred or anything," Rike says resolutely, "but I will say that we've been singing and screaming long before all these screamo bands started coming out. 'New Medicines' was a very screamo record, and it was an insult to us to be called screamo. (Our new style) is the type of music we love, the type we want to play. and the kind of music we love differs greatly from the record that 'New Medicines' was."

It would have been easy to slip right into that genre and put out another record in the same style. But Rike and the new Dead Poetic wanted nothing to do with that.

RIKE: We basically watched the style of music that we thought was so original turn into the trendiest thing in music, and personally, the crappiest thing in music... What we're seeing on MTV and what kids are flipping out over is just the crappiest music I've ever heard. I mean, if I hear screaming over poppy guitars one more time I’m going to shoot myself in the head. I’m over it. I’m like ‘This isn’t rock and roll. This is feeding kids crap because it’s what they know.”

 

I mean, some screamo is good and some screamo is bad. That's just how it is with any genre and when something gets popular of course it's beaten to death, but like I would have embraced it and worn it like a badge like "this is what screamo is and we do it better"

 

Yeah, agreed. I’d be willing to bet that Brandon, with some hindsight all these years later, would probably agree as well. He seems like a pretty levelheaded guy who was just burnt the fuck out by the industry and Tooth and Nail back in the day and it all took a toll on his personal relationships and it made him a little bitter. I really respected his decision and reasoning for walking away upon realizing that spending time with his wife and working in graphic design was the life he’d actually always wanted and needed while he was busy chasing this other life he only thought he wanted.

 

Getting noticed and basically thrown into the industry that quickly and early couldn't have been easy

 

one of the scene’s best records imo. They made it seem for a while like new material could come at some point, both from DP and ANWS, but alas that ship has sailed. Never cared much for vices aside from 3 or so songs. Glad rike has kept busy with his design business though, always smile seeing his name pop up.

 

solid list! i would of picked 'resolution' from hidden in plain view over 'life in dreaming' though, life got LOADS of love and i still see love for it these days. i never see anything for the follow up which is awesome!



Ten Underrated Drive-Thru Records Albums You Should Listen to While Eating Taco Bell at 2 a.m. (thehardtimes.net)