The Crownhate Ruin - Intermediate 7"

1. Better Still if they Don't Know

2. Every Minute's Sucker

Dischord/TC Ruin 1995

7:37, 14MB 256K MP3

A lot of the music from this period (and well.. pretty much any period) feeds off, borrows, steals and appropriates from its contemporaries. Hoover and Indian Summer were some of the first bands birthed from the hardcore scene that more or less got the 2nd (or 3rd, depending on how you want to look at it) wave "emo" ball rolling. I don't want to bore anyone with explanations of what emo was then as opposed to now (Andy Radin explained it years ago at fourfa.com) but long story short: before Dashboard Confessional (which itself is an amusingly out of date reference point) and the floppy haired Myspace bands (ditto) turned post-hardcore into pointless melodramatic histrionic hissy-fits, people bored with the then reigning hardcore template started experimenting with slowing down, adding dissonance, loud-soft dynamics and basically throwing some wrenches in the mix as far as playing with what was up until then primarily a by the seat of your pants, immediate music style. Plenty of bands had broken with the mold before all of that: The Minutemen upped punk/hardcore's musicality and even Black Flag slowed things down and got dissonant and introspective as time went on. DC had their own take on things with the famous "Revolution Summer" and post that, there was a lot of slowed down weirdness happening that made moshers scratch their heads. Some of it morphed into bland college rock and some, like Hoover, retained a bit of a sinister bite.

Anyhow, yeah. Back to Hoover. Seeing as I was raised in the midwest during the early 90's (ie, pre-internet) we were always last to catch wind of any musical trends. I went with some friends to see a local band and they ended up opening for Hoover. I wasn't sure what to think at the time. The energy was undeniable, but I couldn't really figure out what was supposed to be happening. The time signatures and tempos changed constantly and it wasn't something that my up until then Gorilla Biscuit saturated musical palate knew how to digest. I remembered being wowed and getting the record, but it took months for me to "get it". Once this wave of music started happening, you had everyone wearing sweaters, highwaters, clunky work shoes and gas station jackets.

Fast forward a year and Hoover splintered into Regulator Watts and The Crownhate Ruin. I personally Think Hoover was greater than the sum of its parts, but what always struck me was the fact that both of those bands sounded like Hoover, yet sounded nothing alike.

Fred Erskine is a big part of why I picked up the bass instead of guitar back in my formative years. The bass really carried Hoover and The Crownhate Ruin's music, and again, after a steady diet of hardcore and crossover, it was encouraging to see that the bass could play a more prominent role than just "lower guitar". I was lucky enough to see The Crownhate Ruin a couple of times. Once with Vin on drums and once with his replacement (if I remember correctly) who while a competent drummer really struggled to play his parts live. Vin is an was a beast on the drums and his absurdly quick rolls and cymbal grabs are pretty intense. Vin's previous band, 1.6 Band, is somewhat active again and they're definitely worth checking out.

Anyhow, for whatever reason all of The Crownhate Ruin's material was released at more or less the same time. They put out 3 7"s, a split with Karate and a sole LP: Until the Eagle Grins. Intermediate was recorded about halfway through the band's lifespan, but before their LP.

DL

Generation of Vipers 12"

1. Ventricle

2. One Year too Early

3. The Way, The Truth and The Life

4. Side of

5. Tried & True

6. Voice of the Generation

Landmark Records 1997ish (1994)

24 minutes, 42MB, 256k MP3

When trying to figure out what to put up here, I'll do a quick search and make sure no one has already put forth the effort and beat me to it. I found another "Generation of Vipers" (who in all fairness have probably never heard of this one seeing as the AR outfit predates them by a decade and didn't do much) At first I was excited that I wouldn't have to spend an hour encoding and slicing this one up, but it wasn't meant to be. I pressed play on their myspace page and Neurisis downtuned sludge happened. Not awful by any means, but not what I was looking for.

Generation of Vipers is a band that has caused more arguments, made more friends and enemies and upset more people than any band of our time. It has done so because it is an utterly frank, no-holds barred dissection of America. In other words of you, your parents, your neighbors and your children.

Those are pretty heady words for a band that wasn't around more than a year and didn't play but a handful of shows in and around their hometown of Little Rock, AR. Like a lot of the bands that came out of AR in the early 90s (ie, Econochrist, Chino Horde, 12ft6, William Martyr 17, Benchmark, etc.) Generation of Vipers had riffs and personality to spare. Musically, they (and again, pretty much everyone from Little Rock) were pretty heavily influenced by Current and did the mid to up tempo hardcore with impassioned vocals with more of a meat (vegan of course; can't forget this was the PC-90's) and potatoes composition.

They were one of those "Should have, could have" bands that broke up before their time that all the Little Rock bands would talk up while on tour. A friend played me a battered cassette of these songs before the LP came out and "One Year Too Early" floored me.

Sadly, the drummer Chris was killed in a car accident. There's mention of him here, and File 13 records (then a mainstay of the Little Rock hardcore scene) did the "We've Lost Beauty" compilation LP in his honor.

Chris also played drums in William Martyr 17. Other members of Generation of Vipers played in bands such as Chino Horde and Thumbnail among others.

One thing that I'm realizing now that I'm going back and scrutinizing these records is that people did not know how to sequence DATs for shit. I can't imagine that many of these bands wanted between 4-7 seconds of dead space between songs. When DIY record labels started getting really prevelant in the late 80's/early 90's, digital was just starting to come into its own and the technology was not nearly as user intuitive as it is today. Digital's main advantage at that point was professed to be audio quality as opposed to ease of editing. Someone (like myself) being able to encode music and trim dead bits off of rendered waveforms was unheard of 15 years ago and so we had DAT tapes, which had digital audio with the ease of use of a cassette. CD-burners were large, expensive pieces of gear that only higher end studios had. CDRs were $5 each and every other one that you tried to burn would throw a glitch or an error. Most masters were sent in on DAT tapes, and they SUCKED. I could go into detail about how this is one of the factors that initially caused the whole return to analog, but long story short: not all DATs would play on all machines. There were also new formats coming down the pipe so quickly and for a while it was a free for all. (All of this was part of the initial impetus for Albini's Electrical Audio studios and his outspoken stance on analog.) Sometimes you'd record something on one machine, and it couldn't be played back on another. As you can guess, the difficulty also extends to sequencing the records. I definitely trimmed some dead air from this 12" and that My Lai 7". I also was able to get better levels, so this and all subsequent posts shouldn't sound all crappy and quiet.

Anyhow, aren't you glad that you just read all of that? Here's the music. I'll shut up now.

DL