- General Admission Standing Room
Orchid
It’s a little known bit of punk lore that when Bruce Springsteen wrote “everything that dies someday comes back,” he was specifically referring to the reunion of the New England band Orchid. Maybe the Boss was a prophet, maybe I’m lying, or maybe Orchid’s obsessions (black jeans rather than blue, roller rinks, mixtape nostalgia, a finely tuned localized pain) were more universal than their niche adoration implies. Maybe—if young lads acting out, made old by a cruel, cruel world, is a recurring feature—New Jersey predicts Valhalla.
If this reads cute, fine. Orchid was always half overreach (ambition to transcend whatever you got, a refusal to settle for mere hardcore striving), with an irresolvable tension between staunch/arch integrity and proto electroclash horniness. The other half of Orchid was an infinitely propulsive monument to chaos. Whether one prefers one half to the other probably depends on the notches on one’s library card. But the band, in their totality, was pure explosion.
The band’s story began with Jayson Green, Will Killingsworth, and Brad Wallace at Hampshire College, a small school where students with signifying t-shirts might find each other (in Jayson’s recollection, Will was wearing “probably something cool like His Hero Is Gone” and Jayson was wearing “some Connecticut hardcore like, I dunno, Fastbreak. Probably Hatebreed…”). After completing the then common hetronormative bonding ritual of trading mixtapes, Will eventually suggested they start a band. Stars so aligned, what followed was an American story so well tread as to verge into archetypal: Jeff Salane was recruited, the band recorded a demo, played a show at the legendary Hampshire College Tavern, and got asked to do a split with Pig Destroyer. In the biopic, Scott Hull is played by Tom Hanks.
Regarding “screamo,” “emo-violence,” or any genre designation and the band’s place within it, that particular blood on Orchid’s hands is complexified. While memory may place the band as part of the San Diego/Pacific NorthWest tradition of white belts and tight pants, the truth is that “Salane, our drummer, was like an indie kind of guy. He sang and played guitar as well as he played drums (which is very good), while Will and Brad came from a crust grind background. Garlock is like a classic hardcore background guy, you know?” Jayson says, comparing the band aesthetics to old photos of Black Flag, where it was like “how do these people even know each other?”
Sonically, the band was unabashed in their attempting to worth within a then nascent tradition of heavy, shambolic, abruptly gorgeous hardcore-adjacent cacophony who captured the aggression of punk, while shying away (in their playing if not their record / t-shirt collections) from the bully-barking which made up so much of the genre. Of course, as the KLF recommends, in attempting to sound like their social betters, Orchid made something—jaggedly melodic leads and self-lacerating, witty preachifying over blast beats—entirely their own.
While they existed, Orchid took on the scene—past, present, and future—with reverence, contempt, and joy. That was Orchid’s approach; taking the dead horse of hardcore and breathing life into it by poking it, prodding it, loving up on it, scrawling situationist slogans on its corpse like they were itchy runes, till the dead horse had no choice but to get up and gallop around the all-ages venue.
After Orchid broke up, the individual members kept their boots on the ground in other projects. Instead of the years creating an insurmountable distance, the band remained close friends. With two decades of reunion disavowals slightly undermined by that absence of schism.
When asked to rate the improbability of Orchid’s reunion, on a scale of 1-10 Fugazis, Green rejects the metric, seeing Orchid’s reuniting as somewhat less “world imploding” than Fugazi getting back together, while making clear that upcoming touring was made possible by the band members’ common bond.
“We’ve been offered stuff forever. Everyone’s got their own stuff going on and it never appealed,” Jayson says. “Finally, I remember talking to Damien Abraham from Fucked Up and he said, ‘You like the guys?’ And I was ‘Yeah.’ Then he’s like, ‘Do you like the songs?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And he goes. ‘So what’s the problem?; And I was like, ‘Huh. That’s a good point.’”
“Then Brad said, ‘you know, I’m kind of ambivalent about reuniting… But I think, when we’re on our deathbeds, we’re not going to be like, I’m sure glad we didn’t reunite Orchid!’”
That was also a good point.
Sure, nostalgia is a corpse to be danced on, but now, with passion being passe still being up for debate, Orchid’s brand of sloganeering—revolutionary love backed by force and caustic rhythms—is a welcome addition to the hell-discourse. Either way, the band—dastardly anti-fash futurists and anti-trad traditionalists that they gleefully and paradoxically are—have returned…ready to revel in the confusion.
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Brendan, Pete, and Luke play in a band called Sinaloa. The time devoted to it occupies their free time, vacations, money, and hardest work. Facing a full summer in the suburbs in 2001, the three of them decided that they needed a project to work on, together, to pass the time. With unused instruments lying around in basements, collected from expired bands (ettil vrye for brendan and Luke, Aché for Brendan and Pete),Pete and Brendan picked up guitars, and Luke sat behind the drums. Through that summer, they got together often to make a lot of noise, and that pattern has continued, since. They still meet up, often, to make sounds, but they have gotten better at controlling them, and they’ve gained more reason to do it than the initial idleness and heat of the suburbs. The initial din became songs, and old friends meeting up became a band.
Drums and guitars, without bass, is an atypical set-up. At the beginning, it was simply the product of the amount of friends around, coupled with each person’s ideal new instrument to learn. The band was first called ‘Rich and the 5 o'clock shadows’, but their friend Rich declined the invitation to sing, making the name somewhat disingenuous. The title of a mix-tape for Luke’s religious minded friend spawned a new name of ‘God Camp Party’, which morphed into the more popular 'God Can’t Party’. Later, their friend Mike Taylor joined up, fairly briefly, for an installment under the name 'Past Marticle’. Mike contributed much to the early efforts of writing songs, but soon did not have time for it, and decided to devote his efforts to his other band Halo Perfecto.
It was then back to the three of them, and they settled on a new, and final, name of Sinaloa - taken from the scribbled graffiti in the back hallway of a house that the three of them once spent a summer. It was a name that seemed appropriate, as it was once tentatively going to be the name of a band to be started by their friend Pete Garland, who has since passed away. In all likelihood, Pete G. would have been the bass player of this band, and would have shared many of the experiences they have now shared, if he were still alive. Over the years, they have played with other bass players and toyed with ideas to substitute bass - alternate cables run through octave pedals, etc - but the empty spot serves as a good reminder of their friend, whom they loved and miss very much.
Sinaloa’s practices have changed venue many times over the past few years. The basement of Brendan’s mother’s house gave way to the basement of a Somerville apartment, which was replaced by a leaky practice space near Fenway, from which they moved on to 3 different practice spaces in Allston (two leaky). A demo, two albums, and two split 7 inches were written in these various rooms. In addition, songs for two different compilations were written and recorded.
One luxury of playing music together has been the opportunity to travel around the United States, playing shows here and there, and meeting many many good people. Sinaloa has toured the east coast, the entire country in a month, the northeast/Midwest in another non-stop week, flown out west to spend a week traveling down and up the west coast with their friends in Life at These Speeds, and most recently making a Cannonball Run style tour to the west coast with Ampere. On top of that they’ve done some ridiculous drives to play far-away fests, and strung together many weekends of travel. The days of endless highways and gas station provisions have always been well worth it, and they’ve been paid in full with infinite hospitality and friendship in almost all of their many stops along the way.
During their time as a band, Sinaloa was lucky enough to be around some special people who helped them find, in a band, ways of expression that fit best with their idea of what a band could, and should, be. The biggest influence came from their friends Dan and AJ, and their band Anton Bordman. By watching the way they conducted themselves, Sinaloa was shown a blistering example of what a band could be, and how much could, and needed to, be sung out loud and strong. Style, speed, and ability may differ, but Anton Bordman taught Sinaloa how to walk. Along the way, Sinaloa met other bands and people who we’ve shared ideas with, and learned from .
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Thou is a metal band from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Though oftentimes misread as “post rock” or “hipster doom” or lumped in with the Southern sludge, Black Sabbath-worship of New Orleans, Metairie, and Houma bands like Eyehategod, Crowbar, or Acid Bath—they share a more spiritual kinship with 90s proto grunge bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, or Soundgarden and the aesthetic and political impulses of obscure 90s diy Ebullition Vermiform hardcore punk. Since its inception in 2004, the band has released five full length albums, seven EPs (some bordering on full lengths), two collaboration records with The Body, two collaboration records with Emma Ruth Rundle, and enough material spread out over splits to make up another four or five full lengths.
Andy Gibbs, Matthew Thudium, Mitch Wells, KC Stafford, Tyler Coburn, Bryan Funck.
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