The Used – The Used

The drum sound on this record is unlike any other. Totally changed the way I thought about how drums could sound when I first heard it.

 

great album.

 

Here's those memorable meet and greet photos w/ (younger) me and The Used!

 

Bert made me realize at the age of 14 that I wasn’t 100% straight.

 

Favorite album of all time. Nice retrospective, now I'll be listening to this all day.

 

Random story:
One time, I went to go hang out with one of my buddies, and he had just moved into a room in Jeph's house here in SLC. And when I was walking through the living room, MCR's tour gear and road cases were spread all out, being used as tables and whatnot, haha. So weird.

 

My mom raised me herself at a very young age and we bonded via music. She bought this album after hearing Taste of Ink on the radio. It was one of the first albums I put on my MP3 player. I remember staying up late and reading the lyrics along when I was supposed to be sleeping. The album means a lot to me. Good review.

 

I came here to also comment on the drums on this record.

 

Gonna rock the shit out of this on the way home from work. Never connected with any of their other albums unfortunately, and I tried.

 

Without a doubt one of the best post-hardcore / screamo albums to ever come from the scene and also the used's best.

 

Best feldy production too

 

Nice review. I still love this album, and I would put the back half of it from Blue & Yellow onward up against just about any other sequence of tracks in an album from this scene during that time period. Just every single song knocks it out of the park.

Sadly, I liked a couple of songs off In Love & Death, but it had no staying power, and nothing they have released since has ever grabbed me like this one. I still have a lot of respect for the band and Bert as a lyricist and vocalist, I just wish I could connect with their material after this record.

 

Pretty much my thoughts apart from it sounds like I’m more of an In Love & Death fan than you’re haha. Completely agree that most of everything after was hit or miss.

 

HUGE ILAD guy here. But after this review, I’ll spin this and see if it’s still the king for me. Front half is titanic and I am in a minority but I really like the softer ones on there like Light with a Sharpened Edge and Yesterdays Feelings.

 

I still think the first three The Used albums are all really solid for different reasons. I probably gravitate less towards the first these days, but I remember really not getting ILAD when it first came out, because I loved the first so much. Man did they fall off after that though...

That being said, I'm meant to be at some nostalgia based pop punk/emo night tonight. Chances are The Taste of Ink will be played and I'll blow my throat to bits singing along.

 

Can't believe it's been 20 years. I remember the article in Alt Press hyping the band. I think it was the whole "singer would scream so hard he'd throw up on stage" that drew me in.

Couldn't even tell you how many times I listened to this album. Do recall seeing them in Toronto in 2002 when they opened for Boxcar Racer. We got to the venue 3-4 hours early so we could secure a spot up front. Tom Delonge came out of his bus 5 minutes after we arrived and was like "wow you guys are here early". Me and my friends were like .

I've got pictures of me with Bert and Jeph somewhere in a bin. Haha

 

20 years? Wow.

This is the band that got me into the scene. In possibly the weirdest way of anyone here - I was 13 years old, and really into wrestling, so you'd often find me on message boards (some things never change). In particular I was on a forum for a website called "UltimateWWF", which is where a guy started saying he was in a band called "The Used", and that he was the vocalist. A bunch of us listened to them and immediately were hooked. The elephant in the room is that, no, it wasn't Bert. But we actually didn't know that, because it was literally within a month of the S/T album being released, and at that point obviously Bert hadn't yet been on The Osbournes etc, so whilst they had a buzz in the scene, the "scene" itself was only getting started. I probably didn't know for sure that it wasn't Bert for quite a few months. But either way, I'd already got my parents to order me the CD, and I listened to it over and over, in particular on a family holiday in the South of France (makes me sound fancier than I am, honestly), leading to the disc getting damaged from listening to it too much on my portable CD player.

It was such a weird way to get into them, because at that point, whilst I liked rock music (Spineshank were a favourite), "emo " certainly wasn't something I'd ever heard of, and it certainly didn't exist in a mainstream sense. As a 13 year old as well, it was doubly weird, because absolutely no one I knew was really past the nu-metal and pop-punk phase.

I doubt I'd be on this forum, and its difficult to say how into the scene I would be were it not for that guy pretending to be Bert on a wrestling forum, but god damn I'm grateful he did that. It elevated my interest in music, and music was absolutely integral to me teenage years. I don't like to think about the possibility that perhaps I wasn't "all in" on the emo scene when it happened.

Also, one of the times I saw them a few years later, Bert phlegmed on me from the stage, and it landed on my shoulder. Pretty fucking disgusting!

P.S. Pieces Mended is forever the ultimate banger.

 

Is there anyone else who has been woken up by "Choke Me" playing after falling asleep listening to the album? I can't count the times that's happened to me.

 

I remember listening to “on my own” in the car with my dad and when he finally screams at the end my dad was like “why did he have to ruin a nice song like that?”

 

I was at this show

 

This album still holds up. Quinn Allman was my emo guitar hero back in the day.

 

Great review, this was the first album I ever heard that I really fell in love with as a kid at about 10 years old, the album that sent me into this scene of music: it will always hold a special place in my heart.

Fun fact: the vibrating distortion at the beginning of the album on Maybe Memories is a dildo being held up against an amp.

 

Haha! Reminds me of the "Sometimes I just Go For It" at the end of the Maybe Memories record.

The most beautiful one-take piano playing you've ever heard, followed by a nasty ass smokers cough.