Neil Perry - Lineage Situation (Level Plane, 2003)
Neil Perry were a band I missed. I think i mustve mostly stopped looking for new hardcore around the end of last decade into the beginning of this one. Orchid was about the only band that I had paid any bit of attention to, and all the rest fell by the wayside. I was listening to a lot of Built To Spill, Pavement, Pinback... mostly indie rock (my other obsession besides metal (doom included), hardcore and post-rock)
So when I started looking for bands like Swing Kids, Orchid, Maximillian Colby and Shotmaker I was amazed and confounded to hear all these kids talking about Orchid, Neil Perry and Saetia as being the forefathers of the current emo / screamo hardcore scene. Well this of course wasnt true to me, what about Heroin and all that jazzy chaotic stuff? What about Native Nod? You know the deal. Weve covered alot of ground in the past few weeks and I realized I forgot way more than I remembered. And it seems I missed way more than I forgot.
Neil Perry, while not rewriting any books, can be said to be clear torch carriers from the early to mid-90's wave of emo hardcore. Born in Jersey from another band that I missed out on, You and I, Neil Perry ratchets up the aesthetic into an Orchid like blinding fury. Lineage Situation collects all of the bands work, in a reverse chronological order, so you get all the new songs (4 unreleased songs to be exact) first and as the disc plays the quality gets less and less and the Orchid similarities become more obvious. But lets start at the beginning.
Nine Minutes of Non-Fiction may be one of the best hardcore songs ever written, beginning with a giant punch in the face, all Uranus and Orchid in wonderful breakneck signatures, the similarities end there as real singing is introduced with some blood curdling screaming layered underneath, and just as you can gbegin to get comfortable with this, they segue into an incredible, dark post-rock journey of mammoth proportions... all in a 3 and half minute span. This is where Neil Perry's strength lies; in their ability to suprise you with melodies and harmonies that would usually seem out of place in such forceful damaging music. The first part of the collection flows wonderful with all disparate parts painting a picture of a band that was dead before its time.
For fans of Orchid, Shikari, Envy, Saetia, City Of Caterpillar.
posted by blend77 at 9:58 AM
12 Comments:
I was gonna post up some 7's by this band this weekend...freaky. I kinda missed out on them also, but this collection will catch you right up. I'm pretty sure it has everything they have done. I like saetia and envy better, but some of these songs rock
we're on the same wavelength..
Envy > Neil Perry > Saetia
i cant get into Saetia as much, but Envy is hands down the bomb... I like Saetia more as time goes on though...
Saetia has been growing on me more and more lately. The more I read about them it seems the more I appreciate them.
yeah, they seem to be another one of the Torch Carriers...
im so glad i still love hardcore.. its one of my favorite things...
easily one of the best things America ever produced.
That's what I like with this blog, blend. The music itself is great but I also like to read something more about bands I'm downloading. And I like your writing, man :)
Forgot to say it before, but your post about OTMOP was equally great.
Keep posting, man, keep posting ;)
And you are right with hardcore. The best american export stuff to me :)
thanks KMS!
im out for the weekend, you guys hold the fort down. Im gonna have to wait to listen to all that choice hip hop next week... damn!
Hey blend, very interesting what you're saying about catching up on a different period of hardcore. I remember getting the Saetia "A retrospective" a year or so ago, and only being interested in parts of it. Specifically, their demo cassette - Venus and Bacchus - back when they sounded kinda like Indian Summer! The later, more 'technical' stuff of American hardcore ahs never really interested me
And papstar, talking of screamo, do you know anything about Lhasa? I keep listening to those songs from the raein-daitro split and I find them absolutely amazing...
Lhasa is Japanese i think, which makes sense.. those fucking Japanese are killing it!!! just about every form of rock they touch turns to gold.
half my favorite bands are Japanese!! haha!
anyway, love to hear a Lhasa album.. those songs are good...
lhasa is out of Japan..very hard to find any info on them, let alone any more releases.
here is their webpage, I think:P
http://lhasa2.hp.infoseek.co.jp/
hmmm, that website looked a little defunct... the last update appeared to be in 2005.
It's been a while since I've found a properly obscure band though! Thanks anyway
i always kind of considered you and i, orchid, and saetia somewhat of a holy trinity back in the day, but i didn't find out about neil perry (or joshua fit for battle for that matter) until it was too late.
orchid was kind of my initiation into all of this i guess - i'll never forget a show at gwu's marvin center in '99 or so where a bunch of unassuming chill skinny white guys take the stage and proceed to blow the venue away. for the first couple of minutes everyone in the crowd just stood there awestruck, looking around at each other wondering what in the hell is going on... and then it clicked, we caught up and an amazing time was had.
as with saetia, i can see these bands as being harder to get into without the context of having seen them live, it makes for an entirely different experience.
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