A RECAP AND A REWIND
27 October 2008
This is what happens in a giant whirlwind. Running around frantically to find a new place to put your roots, little things left undone and then when you finally have the time to reflect you can enjoy things after they have happened. A weird phenomenon and interesting but something you don't want to continue for a long period of time.
Discovering things in hindsight. Unearthing packets of information on the www have let me to find that the emotive hardcore band, Portraits of Past, have reunited and been playing shows in support of a discography of sorts on Ebullition Records. Finding this out sort of rattled my brain, thinking a lost of music from that era would effected be blanketed in the smoky haze of history. After the demise of that project a majority of the members went on to play in The Audience who then turned into Vue; both of whom I've had the chance to see or share a stage with. I haven't run into them for a while as time and moving around does those sorts of things. It's an interesting statement, the action in itself; having the last 10 plus years of music see that era of hardcore/punk spawn the seeds for the post-punk/indie/dance-punk and have that whole movement co-opted into some sort of strange chariacture of hip mobile phone adverts and Indie MySpace blog of the week profiles. Oh, that's another tangent altogether...
Portraits of Past were a great band and out of that era makes for a group of records I still listen to that can still resonate after all the years. There's some spacial, ethereal quality to the recording of their final LP that was a lot different than the records their contemporaries were putting out (well - there was a sense of space on some of the Hoover and post-Hoover projects as well). The choice of chord structures and guitar interplay makes this record as well. Here's some footage of them at one of their recent "reunion" shows in Berkeley, CA:
Ah, a time when bands were named after American presidents or medical conditions, everyone had a zine, rows of 7"s and 12"s in cardboard boxes at shows in poorly lit community centers, and when HeartattaCk Magazine seemed like it was the most read publication in the underground....
