When I’m thinking about my music, I occasionally worry that it’ll make a difference. I’ve come to understand how important music works, most of the time: unless it has the industry and the marketing heads behind it, it will end up being seminal. What a fate! Maybe I’m weird for thinking this, but I’d rather not consider the idea of not seeing the fruits of my own work for decades, if ever (my life plan doesn’t expand past 34). So the respect that some bands for being seminal always seems lost on me, because it’s not really relevant to the creators, and seems like a precursor to reunions. Not that there’s anything wrong with reunions. It’s just that not everyone can be Mission of Burma about it.
This is one of many reasons I respect Omar Rodriguez, for knowing without certainty that he doesn’t want to relive all the ‘important’ music At The Drive In made through the 90s. It’s all well and good that it’s important in 2010, but they’re older men now, and rock and roll is a young man’s game. I’ve come to see their post-breakup compilation as their best album because of this, since it’s such a primer on a band that’s critically important to where radio rock went in the last decade. They are somewhat responsible for emo, but this was before that meant “super produced white boys singing about how much they hate their dad.” There’s a little bit of that in earlier ATDI (the lyric “Daddy taught well at the end of his belt” appears frequently in Picket Fence Cartel) but the distance away from it’s initial release gives it a weird capsule property, a moment in time the same way a lot of early emo feels before the sideways white belt and shitty haircut phase.
Of course, the more notable break in ATDI is the movement away from what we know as emo now into much more surreal matters. The songs from Vaya and Relationship of Command show the direction the band was moving in before the break up, which seemed destined for some kind of incredible new frontier of surrealist hardcore. And we return to this idea of seminal music; Relationship of Command is the best rock and roll album of the last decade, and it remains unchallenged and without a successor, from band members or not. So it would be a natural transition to listen to this and then Relationship of Command.
After Non-Zero Possibility, there’s a heavier focus on oddities. Bonus tracks, singles, remixes and such. It’s a still further exploration of where they were going, in a heavily more experimental direction, with two odd sticking points of Smiths and Pink Floyd covers.
Here’s my point; you should familiarize yourselves with At The Drive In. It’s the music the last decade was, but also should have been, and there’s still a lot to learn in there. Maybe someone’ll be able to understand and answer them in this decade.
WINNER: John
WHY: Well, if they’re seminal, and they influenced me, I guess that makes me more important.
Fermata over Whole Rest 