Won't You Just Ask Me?

In high school I took a class called Music Technology, where the choir teacher, a man actually named Armand, let us fuck around on Garageband for forty-five minutes so he could do whatever else he wanted. We made the absolute worst mp3s imaginable and thought them fertile foundations for a future in music production. A year later, our terrible pop punk band used the same classroom computers to record a demo we called “Chug Chug” that had nothing to do with drinking or anything. Sean, who actually could read music and play several instruments, used his time to make a death metal remix of SpongeBob saying “stepping on the beach! Do doo do doo!” This was the apotheosis of humor and our hopeless obsession with metalcore’s ascendant era.

The lovely thing about screamed (or as real heads inexplicably called them “unclean”) vocals is that you don’t really need to be intelligible. Many acts of the early 2010s made nonsensical and hyperbolic lyrics a core part of their schtick. Being French (Chunk! No Captain Chunk!) or just plain weird (I Set My Friends on Fire) was no barrier to the language of anger and filthy breakdowns. Long as it sounded sick, there was no need for things to make sense.

At The Skylines only released one full length record, 2012’s The Secrets To Life, which did not make much of an impact on the scene or catapult them to A Day To Remember-levels of stardom, but remains probably my favorite example of the genre. Their breakdowns were brutal, their riffs notably original, and their vocals a dueling duet of R&B-style yowls and guttural growls. They even had a Kellin Quinn feature! That their lyrics commit myriad syntactical sins did not dissuade my adoration. “I see the Judas inside the betraying eyes of you.” What in the prepositional phrase? “Deceiving tongue of a serpent you’ve twisted your ways now demise is your path.” There’s a gesture towards archaic grammar, in the way some more self-serious metal bands will invoke biblical imagery and mythology to try and lend gravity to their Tolkienian word salad. These guys are two steps from saying “thee” and “thou” with a straight face.

But man did they know how to have a good time.

Multiple choruses begin with a sort of stuttered repetition,

“So this is, so this is, all you wanted from me.”

“Do you feel, do you feel like you’re running away?”

“Take me, take, pull the veil from my eyes.”

“If you’ve got to ask me, you better ask me …”

None of these are unforgivable, and I believed the band’s confident execution delivered them from corniness. They were better, I was sure, than most other acts of their ilk. (The band’s final release was an acoustic EP, and despite the earnest effort, these songs were not meant for a gentle touch and a cajon.)

The band’s history is chronicled, like so many others that never quite made it, in Facebook posts promising “big things soon…” and open audition calls for a new guitarist and a new screamer who would take this shit seriously (!!). Because of his screaming counterpart’s departure, the mulleted singer Chris Shelley had to do double vocal duty on the band’s farewell tour, where they opened for like three other bands. They would reappear a few years later to change their profile picture, release a single and a video, the mullet gone, but the signature sound intact, then disperse again. Not an uncommon or particularly notable fate, but one that resonates with me still. They did more than most bands could say.

I know I just clowned on the chorus, but their song “Chapter 7” still gets me going. Making a song called “Chapter 7” the seventh track of your album…humbling to say it blew my mind at the time.

Where many metalcore bands were satisfied to powerchord their way through every verse, ATS’ bright lead guitar distinguished their sound from the chaff. It’s the classic bait and switch: opening with that sonorous lead, then switching immediately to the song’s heaviest section, where the kick drum doesn’t let up and the bass riff whips up an awful undertow. They weren’t the first nor the last to double-track the screamer’s lowest screams and highest, but that hair-raising howl is like no other. One quick waltz across the keys and the chorus comes in, bright as dawnlight.

As far as ATS lyrics go, it’s cogent enough, and has that naïve hope of power-pop’s finer moments.

The chorus:

They run through the intro riff again, bait and switch into another droning sludgefest. Chris gives this adorable little Usher-like “uh!” and brings things back upbeat. He shoots off a line I think is genuinely good:

It’s one of the few moments of true vulnerability in the band’s music, a crack in the façade of their otherwise uber-confident delivery. They follow it up with the bridge, declaring,

The artifice and attempt at poetry has returned, but the emotion is genuine, and what could be misconstrued as self-pity is more recognizably an attempt to connect with the song’s subject, and the audience. Beneath all the screaming, the shredding, the fire, and the flourishes, they want to be heard and believed. The breakdown is pretty reserved as far as these go, a moshable beat and a wavy synth line. Its simplicity invites a sort of eye-of-the-storm clarity to things, a moment to reflect.

This was the kind of music I often used to drown out my thoughts. Any song you love though, after a thousand spins, can take on the qualities of a hot shower. The familiarity of its shape allows you to think and feel things outside of its craftily composed turmoil. The artist’s anger and fear neutralizes my own. No longer drowning, the song let me breathe easier.

We all thought Sean was a pretty funny guy, and were shocked to silence when he produced quiet piano pieces with contemplative crooning. At the time I probably believed the need to make others laugh, to delight us with SpongeBob death metal, was fundamentally in opposition to being a serious person or artist. I’ve been wrong about most everything. Sean is a middle school choir teacher now.

I wish I still had that mp3 to play for you. I bet it would make you laugh.

Anyone else seeing/seen Paramore this tour? How are the new songs hitting? The album didn’t really do it for me, but I’m going to go see them anyway.

Also if you’ve seen Taylor Swift tell me how much you paid for tickets. I will keep it confidential! I’m just curious! We got nosebleeds for $60 and it feels like we committed a crime.

New tradition, cat pic for the dedicated scrollers: