Heavy Mental: It's Nice to Be Surprised

Columns, Top Story

It’s not very often I get excited over new music.

Let me clarify that: I can hear something new from a band, or from a project featuring musicians I’m a fan of, and get excited. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the surge I used to get, back before YouTube and the Internet and downloading and 24-hour music television. Remember, when you just happened across a band because a friend mentioned it, or you caught a couple of seconds on an obscure radio station, or something caught your eye in a music store or a magazine?

The list is short of bands that came out of nowhere and really blew me away. Trivium (happened upon the band’s demos before the release of Ascendancy), Obituary (cover art for Cause of Death caught my eye), Slipknot (given a demo of the band at a Biohazard show before the self-titled release came out), Sunny Day Real Estate (mid-’90s 3 a.m. MTV blocks), Jawbreaker (ditto). That’s just off the top of my head.

Add one more to that list.

I can remember (over the past year or so) trolling around stores looking for music, and seeing the Silversun Pickups and just going about my business. The cover art and band name stuck in my mind, but that was about the extent of it. There were tons of bands kicking around that I hadn’t heard of at the time. More recently, I caught the tail-end of a song on a digital music station a couple of weeks ago, which led to me, basically, sight-unseen, picking up the band’s latest, Swoon.

And I can’t stop listening to it. Hell, I can’t even get through the entire album. I keep going back and checking and re-listening to tracks. I can’t think of a song in the last five years that has captured my ear quite like the gentle drone of “The Royal We”. It’s like the band somehow recaptured that moment in 1994/1995—the tail end of Jawbreaker and the beginning of Sunny Day Real Estate, with the lo-fi dirge and muddy guitar play.

The band is definitely channeling a lot of classic ’90s acts (the aforementioned, and possibly Pixies, or Mudhoney), with just a hint of something like Coheed and Cambria (in the vocal delivery). It sounds like a throwback, but manages to somehow sound fresh at the same time. Go check out the aforementioned “The Royal We”, or album opener “There’s No Secrets This Year”, or the more pop-influenced “Panic Switch”, and you’ll be hooked.

The best part of those moments of discovery is realizing you’ve been overlooking this band for a while, and now there’s so much to catch up on. Or that you’re getting into this new band on “the ground floor” (so to speak). It’s the feeling that reminds you why you love music, and usually comes right around the time of a listening funk, where you can’t think of anything from your collection that will really make the drive to work a little more enjoyable. But when it hits, well, there’s little that compares (at least from a musical standpoint).

Call it one of life’s happy surprises.

Jonathan Widro is the owner and founder of Inside Pulse. Over a decade ago he burst onto the scene with a pro-WCW reporting style that earned him the nickname WCWidro. Check him out on Twitter for mostly inane non sequiturs