Breaking a lot of barriers with today's album. My first rec on site, and a release obscure enough to not be on streaming beyond YouTube, something that has not happened yet (with the exception of one brand new album from February that hadn't released yet on streaming, though now has). I can't even pull the album cover from MusicBrainz like I usually do; it's from Discogs this time. I really prefer to be able to listen to things on Spotify, but am very willing to make exceptions to this rule as long as it is somewhat easily obtainable. This is also the shortest release in runtime I have played as part of this project, as this is a 7" EP. I think it goes without saying that I know nothing about this group, but just in case, let me say that I know nothing about this group. Now you know.
Unfortunately, this was very much not it for me. I've recently mentioned a few times that I really dislike music that heavily features screaming vocals, and this takes that to the extreme. To its credit, I actually do find the guitar distortion pretty cool. Maybe it's hypocritical to like that similar sound when created by guitars as opposed to vocals, but there's something specifically irritating to me that I can't quite pin down about screams. And I've gotten on my soapbox before with regards to my thoughts on people liking music that I don't like; I think that's cool as hell and you should keep liking your stuff regardless of what this one random internet person thinks. I don't know what I'm doing anyways. No runner up favorite racks this time, not because I didn't like it, but because there are 3 tracks.
(edit to add blog note: tumblr asks kinda break the theme I was using, so reverting back to the tumblr default theme for now while I consider the best way to solve this problem)
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Jasemine - Silence
I'm not sure how well-remembered any of this stuff is today, but in the mid-90s, there was a sudden vogue amongst the more underground/avant-garde/basement show segments of the hardcore scene for bands from France. Compilation LPs were the original releases that brought these bands, as well as other bands from Europe who were musically and/or ideologically compatible with the American bands and labels of the time, to the attention of kids in the USA. Ebullition's Illiterate LP, released in 1995, was probably the most important of these--released by a California label, containing songs by European bands that Ebullition's flagship band, Downcast, had met on their European tour, it put a lot of bands on a lot of people's radar. From that LP, and from other comps like the Food Not Bombs Benefit LP on Inchworm and the All The President's Men LP on Old Glory, I got to know a whole bunch of awesome European bands, particularly the French band Finger Print.
Finger Print were a quartet that played upbeat hardcore with a relatively strong youthcrew influence. You could tell these guys had a few Chain Of Strength and Youth Of Today EPs in their record collections. What set them apart was Nicolas Fisseau's brutal, high-pitched vocals. The guy sounded like he was in an out-of-control rage, screaming so hard he was probably shredding his throat and spitting out blood between lines. Overtop of some powerful, chugging, but (it must be said) relatively undistinguished riffs, his voice was enough to take Finger Print to the next level all by itself. I compiled a short mixtape of all their compilation appearances that I used to listen to over and over in my car. I thought they were great. (This post isn't about Finger Print, but here is their song "Surrender")
In the 90s, before the internet, information traveled through the underground hardcore scene slowly, in fits and starts. Depending on what state (or country) you lived in, you might know a ton about one nearby scene, while only hearing the vaguest rumors about another equally important scene located farther away. You might never see copies of important, era-defining records that got lauded to the skies in zines, only getting a chance to hear them when some traveling punk band came through your town and the bass player let you dub a copy of his 5th generation Hated cassette. And this was just in the United States! Information about what was going on in Europe was so spotty as to be all but nonexistent for US hardcore kids.
What I'm trying to say is, it makes perfect sense that I didn't discover and get into Finger Print until after they broke up. It makes sense that a band that did its last recording session in spring 1994 didn't reach my ears with even their earlier material until summer 1995. What's weird is that, by winter 1995, I owned a record that had been recorded only a few months earlier by the short-lived post-Finger Print band Jasemine (or Jasmine--but we'll get to that in a minute). Jasemine was just Finger Print without Nicolas Fisseau. When he quit, the other three members of the band--guitarist Christophe Mora, bassist Thomas Guillanton, and drummer Jerome Bessout--decided to keep playing, under a new name. Mora switched from backing vocalist to lead singer, while Guillanton took over the backing vocal duties.
Kidney Room Records, a short-lived hardcore label from New York City whose initial claim to fame was releasing the Swing Kids 7 inch*, had been advertising an upcoming Frail/Finger Print split 7 inch in zines like HeartattaCk. I definitely wanted a copy. However, between when they initially made the plans for the record and when they got the money together to release it, both Frail and Finger Print broke up. Frail's fellow Philadelphians Elements Of Need, led by guitarist Eric Wareheim (yes, THAT Eric Wareheim), took over the American half of the vinyl, while the remaining members of Finger Print contributed two songs by their new band.
I stumbled upon this split EP in the record collection of a guy a couple of years older than me who'd just moved to Richmond from the smaller city of Roanoke, three hours away. He didn't have the best reputation in his former hometown, but I didn't know that at the time, so I ended up living with him for a few months. The guy was hard as hell to collect rent money from, but he had an amazing record collection, and I made tons of mixtapes from his 7 inches and LPs. One of the tapes ended with the Jasemine side of the Elements Of Need split--but it cut off in the middle of "Silence" because I ran out of space. For months, all I had was the first 50 seconds or so of the song--and by the way, I'd also apparently misspelled the name of the band on the mixtape's handmade cover. On their only two other releases, their demo and a split EP with fellow French hardcore band Ivich, their name was spelled "Jasemine"--but Kidney Room misspelled it as "Jasmine" on the cover of the Elements Of Need split, and I didn't ever see any other records by them until years later. Considering that the Ivich split and the demo were released by Christophe Mora's own label, Stonehenge Records, I trust the spelling on those releases to be the correct one. But until 1999 or so, I had no way of knowing any better.
After a few months, it transpired that the guy from Roanoke was stealing money from friends of his (including me), and sleeping with multiple girls around town, all of whom had been led to believe he was their faithful boyfriend. When his transgressions became public, he was out of town, chasing after a female zinester from Chicago. Instead of coming home and facing the mess he'd made, he asked those of us living with him to sell his record collection and wire him the money. I knew I was never going to see that month's rent and utility payments, so in a petty (but, in hindsight, completely warranted) maneuver, I swiped a box of his records and hid them in my closet, then sold the rest (minus the ones my other roommates had taken--he owed all of us money by then). He didn't even get $100 out of the sale. Then again, I also never got my rent and utility payments, so fuck it, we're even.
I did, however, get his copy of the Elements Of Need/Jas(e)mine split. Finally, instead of my tape cutting off right in the middle of "Silence," I could listen to the whole thing. And boy, did I--for the next several months, I wore out the Jasemine side of that 7 inch. I still loved Finger Print, but I couldn't help but recognize that Jasemine were worlds beyond what Finger Print had been up to. The split's first song, "Heritage," was cool--a midtempo tune that mixed melodic guitar arpeggios with some driving hardcore riffs, and had an excellent intro. But it was "Silence" that really knocked me the fuck out.
Beginning with a fast stick-clicking countoff from Bessout, "Silence" slams into a full-speed syncopated hardcore riff of the sort that was really popular in the 90s. "Chaotic" was a big buzzword in the underground scene at the time, and between 3/4 time signatures, off-time pauses, and heavy use of syncopation, a lot of bands were finding ways to add spastic shocks to the furious velocity that had always been intrinsic to the hardcore genre (which is why you can see a lot of band members falling down midsong if you watch old 90s hardcore live videos on Youtube). Jasemine were still too close to their late 80s youthcrew roots to mess with 3/4 time or what my friends and I called "stops," but they sure understood the purpose of syncopation--not to mention palm-muted chugs, which they threw into "Silence"'s chorus at the perfect point to make listeners feel like their whole body was gonna explode.
The craziest thing about Jasemine, though, was the transformation that had occurred with the switch from Nicolas Fisseau to Christophe Mora on vocals. I'd thought Nicolas Fisseau had the most brutal voice ever. But it turned out that he didn't even have the most brutal voice in Finger Print. As gnarly, high-pitched, and throat-shredding as Fisseau's vocals were, Christophe Mora was even higher-pitched and gnarlier than that. What's more, while Fisseau had sung in English, Mora dispensed with translations and sang in his native French. This was a respectable move in a time when the hardcore scene was pushing for bands to quit imitating the older American bands and forge ahead with more personal, innovative sounds. It also gave Mora the luxury of singing lyrics written in a slurring, vowel-heavy language that was for the most part free of the hard consonants of English's post-Germanic phrasing. To someone like me, who spoke not a word of French, his screams sounded mainly like collections of tortured vowels--but damn if he didn't sound PISSED AS HELL. I was impressed. And then on the chorus, when Guillanton's deeper, harsher voice threw in a few words at the beginning of each line, it was the perfect counterpoint. I had no idea what these guys were singing about, but clearly they fucking meant it.
As with a lot of small-press hardcore releases, especially those who've been through one or more owners before they reach you, my copy of the Elements Of Need/Jasemine split did not contain a lyric sheet. There was one printed and enclosed with at least some of the original copies--or so I've heard--but the dude I ganked this record from didn't exactly take good care of his vinyl, so chances are he lost it at some point. However, I was able to google and find the lyrics to Jasemine's "Silence" on the internet.
As I said, I have no idea how to speak French ("bonjour" and "no parle Francais" are about as far as I can get), but I can tell just from looking at the words and listening along to the song that the chorus is this part: "Je refuse d'accepter que la tendance soit celle d'etre résigné. Je refuse de garder en moi toutes mes idées." Thomas Guillanton is obviously singing the "Je refuse" part, and Christophe Mora is singing the rest. What does it mean? "I refuse to accept..." something. I'm sure it was important to them, and I'm sure if I fed those lyrics through Google Translate and got a butchered, grammatically incorrect version of them in English, I'd appreciate what I found. But in the end, it does not matter. The effect "Silence" had on me was dramatic enough that, after all this time, learning the lyrics would not increase that effect one iota. All I hear is Mora and Guillanton screaming like they're in the midst of losing their minds--and that reaches me on a deep level, regardless of whether I can understand the words. To this day, I can't hear this song without getting caught up in it.
-- Andrew Necci (Andrew wrote our second ever week, on Buffalo Tom.)
*--they only pressed the first 500 copies; it's since been repressed countless times by Swing Kids singer Justin Pearson's label, Three One G. In fact, the only copy of the Kidney Room pressing I've ever seen is [cough] my own. No, I will not sell it to you.
[EDIT] A reader’s comment:
hey just saw your post about finger print and wanted to give you a couple of corrections. Im james Spooner who ran kidney room records. thanks for the shout out. The first record I put out was frail. Then jasmine and elements of need then swing kids. The swing kids first pressing was 1000. That sold out before it was released so I quickly did a follow up pressing of another 1500. Besides that it all looks good. Thanks again for keeping the history alive
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