Current, Fisticuffs Bluff, And Still Life Push Us Away From The Warm And Fuzzy

jharv | December 26, 2007 3:20 am
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A fan of our “12 Days Of 90s Emo” feature writes: “time to get off the poppier side of things. where are the still life, indian summer, current etc videos!!!!!” Good question!

The simple answer is that there are lots of clips of the many, many ’90s bands whose quasi-political/poetical rage made them feel like rats in a cage silk-screened sleeve, who jerked left at the sound of la-la hooks and instead focused on making their neck veins get to poppin’, who were too violent to be ignored by hardline zines but who had strayed far enough from the ‘core to leave those same reviewers with a suspicious stink eye, with the early Gravity Records as sort of the official (if ambivalent) dividing line between D-beat and emo bleat. However, they are all live clips reduced to a cruel, rumbling mush of YouTube compression, but okay, okay…since this whole conceit is blatant nostalgia-mining we can probably overlook the potentially limited appeal.

Current doing “Leech” live @ the More Than Music Fest in ’94. The semi-coherent diatribe/intro might be the most truly emo (or at least “90s hardcore”) thing we’ve posted during this rundown so far.

Fisticuffs Bluff (scraping that hardcore/screamo lip) tearing up a safe American home, also in 1994. This sounds about as rough that VHS copy of Emmet Otter I was talking about on Monday, but still: swoon.

Two minutes of Still Life’s “slow emotional sad hope” to quote this YouTube uploader, and a good reminder that for all of their Internet-era fame, most of these bands in their “prime” were playing to, like, 12 people in oversized skateboard shorts in someone’s carport.