Untitled

A Window into Winter: Caribou-Targhee National Forest

Every Record I Own - Day 631: Jets to Brazil Orange Rhyming Dictionary

I loved Jawbreaker but I hadn’t yet come around to Dear You when Blake Schwarzenbach began his new project, Jets to Brazil. As I’ve mentioned before, I was one of those people that felt betrayed by Jawbreaker’s last stab at a more radio-friendly sound, so I approached JTB with some skepticism. My first exposure was their set opening for The Promise Ring at the RKCNDY in Seattle back in 1998. Also on the bill: Pedro the Lion, Sense Field, and Jimmy Eat World. It was a stacked line-up, and Jets to Brazil didn’t have their live set dialed in yet. I was disappointed. 

But my roommate picked up their debut LP, and after a week of spins he decided he wasn’t a fan either, so the album was handed off to me. And I reluctantly gave it a shot. Now that my expectations were low, I began to see JTB’s charms. Orange Rhyming Dictionary quickly became my road trip album. I almost never listened to it at home. In fact, I doubt this LP has been played more than five times. But my dubbed cassette of the album went with me on every long drive, and I now know this album forwards and backwards.

The songs picked up where Jawbreaker left off—taking Schwarzenbach’s scratchy guitar tone and rough hewn melodies and adding a little more ‘80s art rock / new wave into the mix. There was a stronger storytelling vibe to Jets too. It no longer felt quite so much like the poetic journaling of Jawbreaker so much as it felt like a series of character vignettes. Consequently, the drama felt less heavy-handed. You could listen to songs like “Sea Anemone” or “Conrad” a dozen times before realizing they were documenting the suicides of strangers. It was a record that could feel empowering (”Morning New Disease”), dystopian (”Resistance is Futile”), angsty (”Chinatown”), and downright charming (”Sweet Avenue”). It’s a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, but its pacing and consistent pop hooks make it an inviting record. 

I would only get to see Jets to Brazil live one other time: on their last tour. They played at a club called Graceland in Seattle on a heavy night. The club’s bar manager was a well-liked guy in the music community, but he’d just been found guilty of manslaughter for crashing his boat while intoxicated. Scott Jernigan, the drummer for local legends Karp, was killed in the incident. Scott was loved and respected, and his death was tragic. The bar manager’s sentence didn’t offset that tragedy, but only seemed to add to it. I’m not sure how many people at the show that night knew about the verdict—maybe only the staff and a handful of patrons. And I doubt anyone in Jets to Brazil knew. But they ended their set with “Rocket Boy”—the last song off their last album Perfecting Loneliness. Like so many songs off Orange Rhyming Dictionary, the song captures a scene. In this instance, Schwarzenbach uses a first-person vantage to describe a drunk driving accident from the perspective of the intoxicated driver. There’s no sermonizing or lecturing in the song—just snippets of memories so random and detached that it takes a few listens to connect the dots. It was inadvertent timing, but it remains one of the most moving and profound performances I’ve ever witnessed—a sympathetic chronicle of a fatal mistake. It was beautiful and bittersweet.

Maybe Blake said it best on the Jets song “Wish List”

Some people say I’m corny or I’m morbid I always thought I was touching, I was tragic One man’s magic is another’s plastic

Every Record I Own - Day 619: Jawbreaker Dear You

I bought 24 Hour Revenge Therapy the day I finished high school and spent the summer obsessing over their catalog. That gave me three months to explore and bond with Unfun and Bivouac before the band’s major label debut came out in September of ‘95. Fans of the band know the story: Jawbreaker’s signing was seen as a betrayal, and the resulting album Dear You was initially deemed a disgrace. Three months may seem like a very short period of time to become so possessive of a band, but those three months involved a lot of transition and change in my life, and Jawbreaker’s combination of melancholy and Thoreau’s “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” philosophy was the perfect salve and soundtrack.

Dear You came out a few weeks into my first semester of college, and I would first hear it when the album showed up at our college radio station. Like so many other Jawbreaker fans, I was disappointed. I was bummed they’d made the leap to a major label, and I was bummed that they’d polished their sound. Blake’s vocals were smoother (though no one seemed to want to acknowledge that the lighter timbre might be the result of throat surgery to remove nodes on his vocal cords), the dissonance was gone, and the songs felt less exploratory. I loved the Jawbreaker that sounded like wildflowers growing in a ditch, not the Jawbreaker that sounded like a bouquet from the 1-800-FLOWERS. 

That disappointment didn’t stop me from seeing Jawbreaker several times on the Dear You tour. I remember first seeing them at the Capitol Theater Backstage in Olympia, WA. The Capitol Theater was a big multi-use theater that would often host larger concerts in the main hall, but smaller events like a Jawbreaker show were held with the both band and audience on the actual stage, with the band playing on a small platform poised over the lip of the stage and the audience seeing a back drop of rows of empty seats. They opened with 24 Hour Revenge Therapy’s “Jinx Removing” and the crowd erupted. The force of the pit caused the first few rows of people to lunge forward, and the platform holding the band and PA slid backwards so that the whole show was in danger of tumbling off the stage. The show was halted and people were asked to take a few steps back while the platform was pushed away from the precipice. “We’re gonna play a new one,” Blake announced to meager applause. “I know, I know… give it some time to sink in,” he said with a resigned smile.

I loved Jawbreaker, but it would take five years for Dear You to sink in. I hated the album and refused to buy it. The band would break up less than a year after it came out. Over those five years, I’d attend university, take two semesters off to tour, meet my future husband, watch the beginning and ascendency of Blake’s new project Jets to Brazil, and listen to those first three Jawbreaker albums over and over again while completely ignoring Dear You. Then May 2000 rolled around and it was finals week for my last semester before graduation. I was driving home from a late night at the campus art studio and tuned into the college radio station. “Fireman” was playing. It’d been years since I’d heard Dear You’s lead single, and it actually sounded pretty good. I pulled up to my house as the song ended and it immediately segued into the album’s next track, “Accident Prone.” Of all the songs on Dear You, “Accident Prone” is the track that sounds the most like the old Jawbreaker I loved. It was downtrodden and introspective, and as I sat there in my truck listening to it, I realized I’d been an idiot for not giving the album a chance. The song ended and the next track, “Chemistry,” came on. I realized that the DJ was playing the entire album.

As a KUPS DJ, I knew this was not proper protocol for the radio station. Either someone had failed to show up for their shift and the previous DJ had simply thrown on the album to fill time til a replacement could be found, or the scheduled DJ was so overwhelmed with finals week that they put on the CD while they crammed for tests in the booth. Whatever the circumstances, it gave me a reason to sit in the cab of my truck outside of my house and listen to the entirety of Dear You. It finally sank in.

Every Record I Own - Day 618: Jawbreaker 24 Hour Revenge Therapy

I bought 24 Hour Revenge Therapy on my last day of high school. I celebrated graduation by going to see some local punk bands play at a rental hall in downtown Tacoma, and on the way I swung by the neighborhood record store to pick up this LP. The next day I played 24 Hour on repeat as I sorted through all my things and packed up my room. My parents were moving back to Hawaii and I was staying in Tacoma to work for the summer before starting college in the fall. I cleared my shelves, took all my posters and show fliers down off my wall, emptied my desk drawers, and sorted through my closet as Jawbreaker played over and over again. It was a bittersweet day. There was an obvious sense of satisfaction with finishing high school and an excitement of my upcoming independence, but there was also the expectant sadness of closing the chapter of adolescence and preparing for adulthood.

24 Hour Revenge Therapy opens with “The Boat Dreams from the Hill,” a song that feels a bit nebulous in its opening verse. The drums are punchy and the bass has a nice gritty tone (courtesy of Steve Albini and Electrical Audio recording studio), but the guitar seems a little fizzy, the vocal melody sounds non-committal, and the lyrics are… about a neglected boat? Maybe not the strongest opening minute of music on first listen, but then there’s a break and a choke at the minute mark, and Blake Schwarzenbach sings “I wanna be a boat…” and everything falls in place with a big triumphant chorus. “I wanna learn to swim, then I’ll learn to float, and begin again.”

Over 25 years later, that chorus still gives me goosebumps. It’s a song about yearning, about hope, about realizing your potential, and it’s all in a metaphor about a neglected boat on some guy’s lawn. From there the album delivers a curious double dose of surface-level frivolity in “Indictment” and “Boxcar.” Both songs are almost defiantly chipper pop songs, but both songs use their sugar coating to deliver a frank examination of the self-sabotaging pedantic punk scene. They’re the first songs I would latch onto on those first few spins because they sounded the most in-line with my listening habits, but they were also critical of that comfort and familiarity. They were songs about growing up and questioning your peer group. The oft-quoted chorus to “Boxcar”—“1, 2, 3, 4, who’s punk? what’s the score?”—is the perfect quip in response to the relentless judgements of a community that was supposed to be your ally. 

Jawbreaker then descends into the more turbulent aspects of their art. “Condition Oakland” tapped into the feeling of yearning from “The Boat Dreams…” but stripped away the optimism, leaving only this sense that resolution and comfort were something just out of reach. And then there was the longing of “Ache,” a song I would listen to countless times during my freshmen year of college when I needed comfort. Some songs were tougher nuts to crack: “West Bay Invitational” always felt cryptic—a song about… an exclusive party? It felt deliberately difficult, but the final bars of the song provide melodic resolution, and then it feels like you’ve actually finally been let into that secret society. Those difficult songs were a big part of what kept me coming back, because you could hear the beauty buried within them, but it took some work as a listener to uncover them. This had always been Jawbreaker’s MO. Hell, they laid out that strategy on their first album when they sang “you don’t like the way we sound / we don’t like the way you hear.” I wound up listening to this record so many times that I wore out the grooves and had to buy the reissue a few years back.

If I love an album, I’ll love it forever. I don’t typically get worn out or exhausted on a piece of music to the point where my opinion of it turns sour. I’m more likely to just slowly phase out an old favorite that’s lost some of its luster. But I still play 24 Hour Revenge Therapy frequently. It’s an album that means a lot to me personally because it captures an era of my life and an era of the underground music community I loved, but it also touches on the timeless topics of maturity, longing, and desperation in a way that’s never too eager or too earnest. It’s a record that sounds like a willful smile in the face of adversity and a tight embrace in times of turmoil. 

Every Record I Own - Day 617: Jawbreaker Bivouac

“You can’t dance to pain,” read a now-famous complaint from a former fan in a letter to Jawbreaker after the release of their sophomore album Bivouac. It’s not as if the Bay Area trio suddenly churned out some somber Leonard Cohen-esque record, but it is fair to say that Bivouac was a much darker and heavier record than their debut album Unfun. 

That said, opening track “Shield Your Eyes” is actually a pretty triumphant number. Though its mid-tempo pulse and sustained chords give the song a bit more weight and scope than their earlier upbeat, energized punk songs, it still conveys a bright horizon in its tone. But I can appreciate the letter from the concerned listener, because by the time the band gets halfway through the second song, it’s clear that Jawbreaker was interested in a level of catharsis previously absent from their sound. “Big” is rife with interruptions and musical left turns. It’s a difficult song to nod your head to on a purely rhythmic level, but there is also an aggravated aura woven into “Big” that should kill anyone’s desire to cut a rug. The remainder of side A owes more to the electrified loud-quiet-loud drama of post-hardcore or first-wave emo than the empty-calorie perkiness of Bay Area pop-punk. It may also be worth noting that the album was recorded by Billy Anderson, an engineer mainly known for his work with riff titans like Melvins, Sleep, and Neurosis. All in all, there’s a kind of bloodletting at work on Bivouac that must have been jarring to the folks that just wanted to hear a 1-4-5 chord progression with a layer of distortion on top. 

For me, the real meat and potatoes of the album comes on side B. “Like A Secret” opens with a dissonant lo-fi verse, segues into a razor sharp, palm-muted bridge, and completes the cycle with a roaring, spiteful chorus. This is some heavy shit, but the band almost immediately offsets the drama of “Like A Secret” with the bittersweet charm of the album’s closest approximation of their earlier pop-punk leanings, “Chesterfield King.” After that brief respite, the pendulum swings back to the dark side with the most grievous track in their catalog, the bass-driven noise-rock song “Parabola.” Guitarist/vocalist Blake Schwarzenbach would eventually require surgery to remove painful nodes on his vocal cords, and you can almost hear his throat bleeding as he screams “I saw myself in someone else, and I hated them” over and over again. 

But the prize jewel of the album is the title track.

“I dug my fingers in the earth / I drew you pictures of my pain / they were so pretty / they were so vain,” Schwarzenbach sings over a simple bass-chord progression and a few well-chosen guitar notes. Maybe this was the pain that the former fan couldn’t bear. Not the bloody-knuckled discord of “Parabola,” but the quiet, introspective comedown of Schwarzenbach calling out to his lost youth: “Mother / Father / I’m lonely / I’m an only.”

The simple melancholic beauty of the song’s two verses and two choruses then yields to a protracted outro of guitar mangling over the relentless churn of the rhythm section. It’s easy to imagine this song as a set closer, with the band descending into a din of feedback, de-tuned guitars, and kicked over mic-stands before finally hitting the standby switch. 

Every Record I Own - Day 616: Jawbreaker Chesterfield King

Yesterday I talked about Japandroids, how their Celebration Rock album felt like a snapshot of someone else’s youth, and how that dissociation made it a difficult record to connect with. Today we move on to a band that is very much a snapshot of my youth. And that may mean that if you weren’t there during their heyday, then they might be difficult to connect with. Jawbreaker loomed large in my life, and they continue to be an important band to me, but they are also a band that operated at the nexus of a variety of divergent aspects of the underground in a specific timeframe of the early ‘90s, and while that context is thoroughly embedded in my brain and colors every note of their music, I can easily understand how someone who experienced their growing pains a decade before or after me could find Jawbreaker to be less-than-satisfying.

Jawbreaker initially began as a hardcore band called Rise in New York City at the tail end of the ‘80s while guitarist/vocalist Blake Schwarzenbach and drummer Adam Pfahler attended classes at New York University. Bassist Chris Bauermeister and vocalist John Liu rounded out the line-up, though the band would drop Liu shortly after the group relocated to Los Angeles. The personnel change coincided with a shift in sound and name—Rise shed their more hardcore attributes in favor of a stronger melodic focus and changed their name to Jawbreaker. Based on their debut album Unfun, it’s hard to envision there being any hardcore DNA anywhere in the band’s genetic make-up. It’s an album rife with hooks and catchy choruses, and while it’s certainly more musically sophisticated than, say, Green Day or Screeching Weasel, it’s understandable how the band got pegged as a pop-punk group based on that first batch of songs. 

But things changed with the Chesterfield King EP. The title track’s major-key melody and relatively straightforward arrangement fit the mold established on Unfun, but Schwarzenbach’s lyrical vignette of a missed romantic opportunity, a fortuitous encounter with a street person, and a triumphant second-chance with a love interest dwarfed anything they’d previously laid to tape. There are no shortage of pop-punk songs revolving around awkward protagonists and their female crushes, but “Chesterfield King” didn’t sound like some slipshod love song. Instead, it felt like a scene out of Kerouac book, where the author uses small details and down-and-out circumstances to describe the conflict between youthful optimism and the crushing weight of adulthood. A huge component of Jawbreaker’s appeal stems from Schwarzenbach’s literary-minded lyrics, and in my opinion, that skill first came to fruition on “Chesterfield King.”

The remainder of the EP is primarily interesting because it captures the band’s further distancing from their brief tenure as a pop-punk band. “Tour Song” is by no means a highlight of the band’s repertoire, but it does capture the transition from a more jubilant, upbeat sound to the more somber chord progressions and defeated lyricism of their subsequent work. Jawbreaker would also get pegged as an emo band, and you can hear that element creeping into their sound here. Side A closes with “Face Down,” a noisy and bombastic track that feels more in line with the post-hardcore sounds of the Touch & Go roster. Over the course of three songs, Jawbreaker showed how their scope had broadened and how they were able to find a common thread through the electrified bubblegum-pop of the West Coast punk scene, the East Coast’s pained anthems, and the Midwest’s sonic nihilism.