PORTLAND, Ore. – Local music snob Tyler Milton recently heard a local barred owl and mistook the bird’s hoots for a leak of Bon Iver’s new album, sources already tweeting about it report.
“Well, I was walking alone by this cluster of trees near my band’s rehearsal space, as I do when I’m looking for inspiration,” said Milton. “And that’s when I heard it. It really stopped me dead in my tracks. I’d recognize Justin’s dulcet tones anywhere. Then I started to hear these echoe-y type drums in the distance that melted in with the hooting and some guitars from the studio. You know, so totally ‘The Wolves (Act I and II).’ I can’t believe I got to hear it in such an intimate setting, what a beautiful moment.”
Ornithologist Dr. Myra Clarke shared her insight into the situation.
“When I heard the recording it was inarguably a barred owl, which does make sense as they’re quite common here in Portland,” Clarke, who also happens to be a Bon Iver enthusiast, explained. “It’s an understandable mistake. That being said, in most professional opinions, Mr. Vernon’s voice more resembles the hoot of a Great Horned Owl. As for that banging in the background? Sounded to me like it was probably just construction.”
Grammy-winning artist James Blake, who collaborated with Bon Iver on the single “Forest Fire,” provided an insider’s look into the history between Mr. Vernon and owls.
“Of course, given the name of the song, it’s fairly obvious that we talked a lot about the sorts of sounds woodland creatures make. Squirrels seemed too chittery and frog croaking just didn’t really go with the vibe. We started brainstorming about birds and naturally ended up on owls,” Blake thoughtfully recounted. “With Justin’s signature falsetto and wise, yet kind disposition, an owl just made sense. So yes, we did use owls as inspiration for Justin’s vocals in the track, and I’m thrilled to be able to finally share that with the public.”
At press time, The National Audubon Society approached Bon Iver with an exclusive collaboration opportunity available via an obscure streaming service no one wants to sign up for.
We’d be here all day if we cataloged all the side projects, but the Desert Sessions serves as the underground laboratory where Homme and his collaborators experiment with the sounds that would come to define the band’s later catalog (Era Vulgaris standout “Make it Wit Chu” would first appear here). But the real draw on this album is PJ Harvey, who is simply spectacular wailing over a droning acoustic riff that feels like it’s frantically trying to anchor her enormous voice to the planet in “There Will Never Be a Better Time.”
Josh Homme always expressed his desire to make funky synth dance tunes, and he finally made good on that threat with the Mark Ronson-produced “Villains.” The road from Kyuss to Villains would have once seemed unfathomable, but it felt inevitable the longer you were along for the ride. The album is undeniably fun—“Feet Don’t Fail Me Now” is a fitting soundtrack for you to get coked up and rip your pants trying to do the splits during an ironic disco night at a roller rink—but you probably won’t want to revisit the memory (or this album) too often.
One of the band’s most polarizing entries, this offering is dark, unfocused, and decidedly melancholy. The album’s biggest sin is its uneven song selection, where its sky-highs and cratering-lows make it feel more like a Desert Sessions album than a fully-baked offering. This is highlighted by the bizarre choice to end the album on low-point ‘Run, Pig, Run’ when the previous song ‘River in the Road’ capped it off perfectly. But on the other hand, the lyric “counter-proposal: I go home and jerk off” is an all-timer.
The band’s first departure of many, what once was the black sheep of their catalog now feels like a harbinger of things to come. “Lullabies to Paralyze” sets the tone for the latter half of the band’s catalog, where the band flirts with pop-friendlier hits in “Little Sister” and droning journeys in “The Blood is Love.” Also is it just me or does the little girl on the cover look like Josh Homme in a black wig?
With drumsticks counting down like a light tree at a drag race, Queens of the Stone Age’s self-titled debut gets off the start line to a blistering start with “Regular John” and refuses to let up despite hitting a few speed bumps along the way. (Come on, you had to know the car metaphors were coming eventually.)
While Villains felt like a midlife crisis, “…Like Clockwork” felt like a man assembling his musical Avengers to help him reconcile his own mortality after a near-death experience. Joining Homme as he processed his trauma for our enjoyment was Trent Reznor, Mark Lanegan, the return of Dave Grohl and Nick Oliveri, and oh yeah, Elton Fucking John. If you’re a sad grown-up with sad grown-up problems, this album is going to rock the Zoloft off your fucking nightstand. This is adult drug music baby, strap in and feel something, bitch.
While its self-titled album made you feel like the band’s post-Kyuss era would be a success, “Rated R’ made you feel like the sky was the limit for Queens of the Stone Age. There’s really only seven words you need to understand this album: Nicotine, Valium, Vicodine, Marijuana, Ecstasy, Alcohol, and of course—C-C-C-C-C-Cocaine.
Sometimes it’s best not to overthink things—”Songs for the Deaf” just feels right at number one. For everyone that grew up in a dead end town where your only salvation lied in a shitty car with a working radio, this was the perfect album to accompany you as you tried to get you as far away from home that $5 in gas would allow—until you exploded your speakers when the volume kicked up in ‘You Think I Ain’t Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire.’
Thanks to these guys, music has a ‘year zero.’ There’s ‘pre-having a guy in the band that just dances’ and ‘post-having a guy in the band that just dances.’ A ‘bosstone,’ if you will. The original has a name and it’s Ben Carr and by all accounts he is a very sweet man. Let’s face it, other bands have hypemen – Flavor Flav (short for Flavid) and Avail’s Beau Beau, but the matching suits were the smoking gun. They created the expectation that every ska band needs a guy who just dances and I find that mildly inconvenient. What can I say, it’s the impression that I get.
Depending on which Wikipedia article you scan before you lose service on the F train, rock ‘n’ roll experienced a golden age for 50-160 years where a band having a name starting with ‘The’ wouldn’t garner a second look from even the toughest music critics. Enter The Strokes. Fueled by good looks, industry connections, ample resources, and some darn fine hooks, The Strokes made it significantly more difficult to start a band. Suddenly, having your band name start with arguably the most common word in the English language drew instant comparisons. For shame, The Strokes. Where does it end? Did you hear my friend Jessica’s band: The Year of Living Dangerouslies? Of course not. Lost in the industry shuffle and not because they never released any albums, played any shows, or were actually the name of a trivia team in 2006.
Did the red-behatted Sir Frederick Durst and his band of not-so-merry stuff breakers ruin the genre (in between bouts of breaking stuff, obviously)? Looking back, it was pretty ruined to begin with, but you can’t deny it was fun. Birthing countless copies, LB took a newish metal and made it the nu-metal we know today. They also had a wacky guy in the band who wore spooky outfits and contact lenses. Did nu-metal reintroduce their own version of the ‘bosstone?’ Perhaps, but what they introduced full-stop was a soundtrack for Monster-swilling suburban doinks to wail on meeker doinks and perfect their handheld bottle rocket trajectories. I like their cover of George Michael’s ”Faith” and one time I had the best time in an Amsterdam coffee shop watching all the videos back to back with another guy named Mike C.
The Hard Times Editor-in-Chief Bill Conway suggested this one. And rightfully so, this band basically sold audiences a pop-punk shoe that was too big and loaded it with a padded emo in-soles that prevented blisters and shin splints. Did Paramore ruin emo? Who’s to say? Answer: me! But more accurately Bill. And, yes, after Paramore it became legally mandated for people to discuss any new music artist by opening with “Do they sound like Paramore?”
What started out as a tongue-in-cheek comment on the naturally anthemic streetpunk genre favored by skinheads, football hooligans, and people who follow every sentence with “innit?” HS turned out to be better than most oi! bands doing it sincerely. Insult to injury, HS included alumni from politically minded punk bands Thatcher on Acid and Wat Tyler which were antithetical to the entire scene. Also, my band Family Fun opened for HS, and while staying completely in character Fat Bob, Nipper, and Johnny Takeaway said we sounded like pure unadulterated ‘shite.’ Hilarious, guys!
Homie ruined the genre for everyone else (except maybe Hard Skin because I’m pretty vague on the definition of ‘parody’). You can’t take an existing song and rewrite the lyrics without someone asking if you’re trying to be Weird Al. And you know what? He fucking earned it. Hell, he pretty much owns songs about food, so good luck trying to write a country song about rice pudding or a polka about Jolly Ranchers. He ruined all your parody, food, polka, novelty careers with an accordion and a legion of refreshingly unfashionable fans.
Band leader Jack Terricloth passed away two years ago but not without creating a frothing waltzing fanbase that destroyed venues while wearing suits for 25 years before he departed this earthly plane. It’s incredible that so many WAPCDK bands would start in WIFS’s wake, but maybe that’s because it’s so easy to dress like a time-traveling anemic private detective trying to catch and kill Peter Lorre. #ripcloth
The ‘90s were a dumber time with kids all over the world buying zoot suits and pocket watches with their paper route monies. The ‘90s were so all-in with this band that they let them play the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards… even though they were called Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. Why not have the Sack Fondling Uncles play your son’s first communion? Their biggest hit was “Zoot Suit Riot” which was also an account of a horrific racially motivated riot in the 1940s which was totally “not money.”
This band wrote the playbook on the genre and made it so every performance had to look like a combination of “The Crow” and Burning Man: leather in the desert, goggles in a basement. Did NIN invent industrial? Heavens to Betsy no!! But musical architect and future Golden Globe Winner Trent Reznor made it impossible to exclude the word ‘industrial’ when discussing bands influenced by his own. But hey, at least it paved the way for Ministry’s Al Jourgensen to win a Kids Choice Award for “Dark Side of the Spoon.” What is going on with those awards?! “Hey Kids, get ready for a slutty new ode to sex from Orgy!”
It seemed like Kurt knew it too. Personally, I always preferred Candlebox.
Those silly b-boys as they were first known made the people want to dance, which made the people forget the majesty of the Lord, and there is no sin greater. The Beatles ruined the genre of life. Our minds were a temple and their charismatic melodies welcomed in the merchants and money lenders. What followed was years of untold depravity and even our children’s children will not be safe. However, I think we can all agree ‘Octopus’s Garden’ is a stone-cold groove, bay-bays!
As this is Coheed’s first full-length album, ranking at the bottom of their discography is to be expected—it’s just a warm-up for the next two decades of increasingly creative and nuanced work that will develop the story of The Armory Wars. All the songs pretty much melt together in an unremarkable sonic landscape not unlike many other post-hardcore bands of the early 2000s, if other post-hardcore bands were singing about pretend galaxies. The fact that no song title is longer than four words is evidence enough of just how far this debut is from the super unique and technically impressive nerd-metal that would emerge in the following years.
This is the band’s fifth album, but as the first chapter of The Amory Wars arc, it feels like somewhat of a regression not just in plot, but musically as well. To be fair, it’s about bots and revenge—topics that have a ceiling on their listenability. It’s pretty safe to say most of the population isn’t able to have a personal relationship with these themes. Although I did have an uncle who claimed to travel to the future to fight mega-bots. The family doesn’t talk with him much anymore. Anyway, there is some great heavy metal-leaning guitar work across all tracks, but it lacks any real standouts or hits.
It’s fair to say that this is the album in which Coheed really came into their sound. Although, the original release did include eleven tracks of complete silence, a creative choice so insane that fans were reassured this band could never sell out even if they wanted to. A number of audible songs take place on a ship steered by the narrative of a vendetta, so that’s something. But it’s the singable singles that really carry this record, which is otherwise just okay musically.
Coming in at only nine songs and a run time of forty minutes, by Coheed standards this is basically an EP. It’s the first half of the double album prequel-to-the-prequel of The Amory Wars, which follows the saga’s namesake character on a big old existential quest. Many of the tracks have an industrial rock feel to them, with a few electronic beeps and boops thrown in for good measure. It’s a solid album, if not super memorable.
Okay, with this being the only album in Coheed’s full-length discography that’s about, like, normal life, it’s an obvious outlier. It has a rightful place in the band’s timeline, but something about Sanchez’s fantastical writing style when applied to topics of the mundane world comes off as a bit saccharine. There’s a layer of pop-punk to many of the tracks that could appeal to a certain crowd, but at times seems to dull the uniqueness that’s always at the core of Coheed’s sound. However, it does have moments of sincerity that are beautiful enough to remind fans it’s okay to step beyond The Keywork every now and then.
This second half of “The Afterman” hits more deeply than the first—musically it has a wider emotional range, big guitar riffs, and nice melodicism throughout all tracks. It also lays a trumpet track on one song without sounding the least bit ska, marching band, or symphonic—no easy feat, if you ask us.
Oh, you “like their old stuff better?” Well, we like their old stuff and their new stuff, because Coheed’s most recent effort is a venture into new musical territory that serves as an exciting premise for what will come with the remaining three Vaxis albums. There’s an early-80s arena rock feel to this record, with its explosive guitar parts and synthesizer elements. While many of the lyrics draw inspiration from the hellscape of the pandemic, true to Coheed form, the songs still suspend the listener in a place between reality and zealously detailed fantasy. We might even dare to call this album danceable.
Written and recorded at a tumultuous point in the band’s career, this album is nevertheless an extremely satisfying sequel to their previous release and a triumphant conclusion to the main The Amory Wars tetralogy—a word we would never need to know, if not for Coheed and now I use it daily whether I need to or not. It evokes the spirit of early heavy metal, and with the energy running high from beginning to end, not one track feels contrived or out of place. Plus, let us not forget that the late Taylor Hawkins recorded all the drums on this release—a baffling fact that is almost definitely proof of a parallel universe.
As the first installment of the five-part Vaxis saga, this album was much anticipated by Coheed’s fandom. And with fifteen bona fide anthems about two new characters attempting to flee imprisonment at the hands of an antagonistic interstellar empire, it exceeded all r/TheFence expectations. The opening bars of “The Dark Sentencer” are nothing if not a signal to listeners to buckle up, because it’s about to get real Coheed-y. Released twenty years after the band’s beginnings, Vaxis – Act I is a testament to what can happen when you pair passion for weird, niche, hard rock music with consistency and time: it gets weirder, stays niche, and rocks harder than ever before.
While Coheed has continued to make several highly enjoyable, deeply interesting albums in the eighteen years since the release of Good Apollo…Vol. 1, it stands as their defining and most essential effort. Yes, it’s their most commercially successful record to date, but that’s probably because it’s about kidnapping and murder and poison, and people love true crime. Moreover, Coheed has never sounded more like Coheed than they do in these songs. As the “hero’s journey” album of The Amory Wars arc, it’s literally and figuratively epic, and overall just exciting to listen to. There’s a reason “Welcome Home” and “The Suffering” are still Coheed’s chosen live encore nearly two decades later; this record rocks in all twelve sectors of Heaven’s Fence, and here on Earth.
