4 out of 5

Label: Expert Works / American Handstand

Produced by: T.J. Little (2005 remaster)

In a world where I perpetually judge albums by the band members’ past and future associations – i.e. this world – I get a lil’ cranky around Dischord stuff of the early ’00s. There’s no logic to this, really; as a kid who’s own identity was wrapped up in punk during the 90s, I definitely started exploring a lot of Dischord at that point, and my tastes were expanding just as I think we were seeing a general shift towards emo, and that morphed into an indie scene that was smushing emo with indie rock, and by the early 00s that was pushing back in the other direction towards kind of overly self-aware emo punkers, and thereabouts is when I had to let that thread go. Q and Not U was popular right at that time, and I worked at a music store where we sold a shit ton of their albums (from my POV) to kids who were dressed in a way that was culturally misaligned with the kinds of scenes with which I wanted to mingle.

Now, X decades later as this super mature adult, I see “features members of Q and Not U” in the album description, and I can’t let it go.

But I’m forgetting that: A. Q and Not U were pretty good, and if I subtract out parts of the scene that irked me, the parts that remain… I still love; and B. Q and Not U came from somewhere, and given what I just said in A, that ‘somewhere’ was probably closer to where I jumped on the punk bandwagon in the first place.

Indeed: Corm: all that stuff I dug about indie punk rock with enough dashes of emo to give it some depth, and unflashy splashes of post- and math-rock. Yeah, Corm would go through iterations (including the awesome The Elusive) before members recombobulated into Q, but we have a key figurehead here in vocalist Alex Ficker, whose passion on the mic is backed by some deep cutting lyrics that map to the poetry of emo but mostly without the navel-gazing – where there are thoughts on relationships or childhood, it’s blended with some affecting imagery, and pointed religious allusions. The latter is maybe where the youth of the band / Fickers shows, but only if you’re looking for it: there are folks writing much more heavy-handed stuff who have been in the business longer than Corm would’ve been at the time of Audio Flame Kit; it’s more the “necessity” of critical nods to religion / Christianity that remind me of being a teen, but again, you get plenty of old timers returning to this subject matter with less nuance and creativity.

And I can’t just claim that Fickers is solely carrying Corm, since the music is what first caught me off guard. The group is constantly darting around indulgence without it seeming like flashy math gymnastics: they’re absolutely down with grinding out a hardcore riff and some yelling, then peeling back for some lighter, more melodic picking, but will avoid harping on either to the extent that a song becomes just “a punk song” or “an emo song.” Nothing on here makes me cringe, is maybe the easiest way to say it.

It does feel like the group somewhat runs out of new material towards the end of the album, as tracks after Slims are somewhat interchangeable with / mirror preceding tracks. The sequencing hides this extremely well, giving us some broader grooves that are separated by more aggressive rockers, but nonetheless, even after multiple spins I found that the first 3/4ths or so of the album were sticking in my head a lot more than that last 1/4th.

Expert Works / American Handstand have put the 2005 Polyvinyl remaster to vinyl, and it sounds delicious. All the dynamics have great range on the pressing, admittedly I just have the digital to compare to – not the original CDs – and maybe I could “criticize” the exacting reproduction of the artwork (there’s nothing new versus the Polyvinyl edition, but hey, that exactingness is an art in and of itself, hence there needing to be someone credited – Michael Welch – with formatting this stuff for vinyl.