It was about 15 the first time I properly fell in love. Till
then, I thought I’d been in love, but it was just a very strong liking. Then,
in the back of an Oldsmobile, on a boring Friday night it hit me, the opening
guitar solo to a song that’d infect my brain forever. My buddy had been
flipping through the radio and stopped on a song none of us had heard before,
but that cutting tone from the guitar caused the dial to stop instantly. The DJ
rattled off what felt like 50 band names and I hoped I was able to figure out
what I just heard.
“Karate.”
There were three of us in the car, but I was the only one of
us that cared about that song and I was determined to find it.
I was a junior in High School in the year 2000, and I was
certain Led Zeppelin was the best band of all time, with maybe Jane’s Addiction
being a close second. Napster existed, but with my 56k dial-up modem I wasn’t
really able to get very far. So to the record store I went, and in the year
2000, in the greater Boston area that meant one place, Newbury Comics in
Harvard Square.
Mind you, I had no idea if this was even the correct band,
or what album this song was from. But as I was sifting through the Karate CDs I
had no idea what album this unnamed song came from. So it was a guessing game.
I guessed wrong, and ended up with the Bed is in the Ocean, their previous
album. For the record it was an amazing album, but after going back and trying
one more time I got it right, newly released. Unsolved! You could smell that
freshly molded CD when you unwrapped that cellophane.
I’m not going to plod over every track on this album, I’ve
meandered enough as it is. Unsolved starts slowly, with two tracks right of the
back that are almost a slow crawl, poetic and with wonderful guitar between
even better bass and drum interplay. Then, after a small pause, that guitar
solo that I’d been looking for blasts through the stereo.
Sometimes a guitar tone sticks out in my head. Steve Albini
& D. Boon’s guitar tone will always be present in my mind. It’s the same
with Geoff Farina, and never more so than in Sever. It’s a buzz saw in my
brain, and I’ll dream of laying down a guitar track with that much substance
with such little effort.
The Rest of the album is completely seamless to me, from The
Roots and the Ruins with its amazing combination of a bouncy guitar, perfect
backing bass and drums, with lyrics about a decaying system and trying to keep
yourself afloat. One Less Blues
and Halo of the Strange have some of Geoff’s best vocal inflections, with Halo
of the Strange having the 2nd best guitar solo after Sever. This Day
Next Year might be the most relaxing last song on any album I’ve ever heard,
with a building guitar line that sits on top of some excellent drumming that ebbs
and flows as the song reaches it’s climax, and then it’s over.
To me, this was one of the first perfect albums I’ve ever
listened to. There have been many after, but this one really did it for me. It
was the anthem of a summer of playing NHL on my Super Nintendo till 3am before
I realized I had to go to school the next morning. Now it’s work, and it’s like
10pm, but it’s still wonderful.
