Rites of Spring | ||||
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Studio album by | ||||
Released | June 1985 | |||
Recorded | February 1985 | |||
Genre | ||||
Length | 37:32 | |||
Label | Dischord | |||
Producer | Ian MacKaye | |||
Rites of Spring chronology | ||||
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Rites of Spring is the only studio album by American hardcore punk band Rites of Spring. It was recorded at Inner Ear Studios in February 1985 and released on vinyl in June 1985 as Dischord Records #16. The album was produced by Ian MacKaye and contains twelve songs.
The album was re-released on CD and cassette in 1987, with an additional track from the same session, "Other Way Around", as well as the four songs from the Rites' follow-up EP, All Through a Life (track 14–17), recorded January 1986 and released in 1987 (Dischord #22). End on End features the same cover as the debut album.
Guy Picciotto has said of the recording process for the album:
"That record was way closer to the live experience than the first demo. It was recorded with all four of us in one tiny room facing each other with no separation at all. We tracked all the music live in one take in the dark with a strobe going. Later on, I recorded all the vocals for the 13 songs in one take as well, one after the other. There are barely any overdubs at all — just some backups, a few bits of percussion and maybe a guitar part here and there. We played the improv ending on the last song, ‘End On End,’ until the tape ran out and rolled off the reels." [1]
Influenced by The Faith, Rites of Spring continued to combine desperate introspective lyrics with angry melody-tinged songwriting that moved even further from the hardcore punk formula. [2]
Review scores | |
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Source | Rating |
AllMusic | [3] |
The album was listed at number 30 on Kurt Cobain's top 50 favorite albums. [4] [5] Pitchfork online magazine ranked it number 96 on its list of the Top 100 Albums of the 1980s. [6] It has appeared on various best-of emo album lists by Consequence of Sound , [7] Kerrang! , [8] LA Weekly , [9] and Rolling Stone , [10] as well as by journalists Leslie Simon and Trevor Kelley in their book Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture (2007). [11] Metal Hammer named the album in their list of "the 10 essential post-hardcore albums." [12]
Kelefa Sanneh described it as, "The first emo album, and still one of the greatest. It was a volatile album, with Picciotto screaming lyrics that a different singer may have chosen to whisper. [13]
All songs written by Rites of Spring.
Emo is a music genre characterized by emotional, often confessional lyrics. It emerged as a style of hardcore punk and post-hardcore from the mid-1980s Washington, D.C. hardcore scene, where it was known as emotional hardcore or emocore. The bands Rites of Spring and Embrace, among others, pioneered the genre. In the early-to-mid 1990s, emo was adopted and reinvented by alternative rock, indie rock, punk rock, and pop-punk bands, including Sunny Day Real Estate, Jawbreaker, Cap'n Jazz, and Jimmy Eat World. By the mid-1990s, Braid, the Promise Ring, and the Get Up Kids emerged from Midwest emo, and several independent record labels began to specialize in the genre. Meanwhile, screamo, a more aggressive style of emo using screamed vocals, also emerged, pioneered by the San Diego bands Heroin and Antioch Arrow. Screamo achieved mainstream success in the 2000s with bands like Hawthorne Heights, Silverstein, Story of the Year, Thursday, the Used, and Underoath.
Fugazi was an American post-hardcore band formed in Washington, D.C., in 1986. The band consisted of guitarists and vocalists Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto, bassist Joe Lally, and drummer Brendan Canty. They were noted for their style-transcending music, DIY ethical stance, manner of business practice, and contempt for the music industry.
Rites of Spring was an American punk rock band from Washington, D.C., formed in late 1983. Along with Embrace, and Beefeater, they were one of the mainstay acts of the 1985 Revolution Summer movement which took place within the Washington, D.C. hardcore punk scene.
Guy Picciotto is an American songwriter, musician, and record producer from Washington, D.C. He is best known as the guitarist and co-lead vocalist in Fugazi and as lead vocalist of Rites of Spring.
The Argument is the sixth and final studio album from the post-hardcore band Fugazi released on October 16, 2001, through Dischord Records. It was recorded at Don Zientara's Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, VA and the Dischord House between January and April 2001. It was the band's last release before going on hiatus in 2003, until the release of First Demo over thirteen years later.
Embrace was a short-lived American hardcore band from Washington, D.C., active from the summer of 1985 to the spring of 1986. Along with Rites of Spring, and Beefeater, it was one of the mainstay acts of the 1985 Revolution Summer movement, and was one of the first bands to be dubbed in the press as emotional hardcore, though the members had rejected the term since its creation. The band included lead vocalist Ian MacKaye of the defunct hardcore punk act Minor Threat and three former members of his brother Alec's band, the Faith: guitarist Michael Hampton, drummer Ivor Hanson, and bassist Chris Bald.
Dag Nasty is an American hardcore punk band from Washington D.C., formed in 1985 by guitarist Brian Baker of Minor Threat, drummer Colin Sears and bassist Roger Marbury, both of Bloody Mannequin Orchestra, and vocalist Shawn Brown. Their style of less aggressive, melodic hardcore was influential to post-hardcore; their sound was partly influenced by The Faith and their 1983 EP Subject to Change. Other influences include Descendents, Buzzcocks, and The Clash.
Embrace is the debut studio album by American post-hardcore band Embrace.
Post-hardcore is a punk rock music genre that maintains the aggression and intensity of hardcore punk but emphasizes a greater degree of creative expression. Like the term "post-punk", the term "post-hardcore" has been applied to a broad constellation of groups. Initially taking inspiration from post-punk and noise rock, post-hardcore began in the 1980s with bands like Hüsker Dü and Minutemen. The genre expanded in the 1980s and 1990s with releases by bands from cities that had established hardcore scenes, such as Fugazi from Washington, D.C. as well as groups such as Big Black, Jawbox, Quicksand, and Shellac that stuck closer to post-hardcore's noise rock roots. Dischord Records became a major nexus of post-hardcore during this period.
State of Alert was an American hardcore punk group formed in Washington, D.C., in October 1980, and active until July 1981. S.O.A. was fronted by Henry Rollins, then using his original surname Garfield.
Repeater is the full-length debut studio album by the American post-hardcore band Fugazi. It was released on April 19, 1990, as Repeater on LP, and in May 1990 on CD bundled with the 3 Songs EP as Repeater + 3 Songs. It was recorded at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, Virginia, and produced and engineered by Don Zientara and Ted Niceley.
Steady Diet of Nothing is the second studio album by American post-hardcore band Fugazi, released in July 1991 by Dischord Records. Although a persistent rumor alleges that the title is an allusion to a quote by the late American stand-up comedian Bill Hicks, the album title predates the Hicks quote by several years and was actually thought up by bassist Joe Lally.
Happy Go Licky was an American post-hardcore band formed in the spring of 1987, and which broke up after their final show at Washington, D.C.'s 9:30 Club on New Year's Day in 1988. The group was a short-lived reunion of the renowned D.C. hardcore band Rites of Spring.
Washington, D.C., hardcore, commonly referred to as D.C. hardcore, sometimes styled in writing as harDCore, is the hardcore punk scene of Washington, D.C. Emerging in late 1979, it is considered one of the first and most influential punk scenes in the United States.
One Last Wish was a short-lived post-hardcore band from Washington, D.C. It was formed in May 1986 by members of Rites of Spring and Embrace, and split up in January 1987.
Red Medicine is the fourth studio album by the American post-hardcore band Fugazi, released on June 12, 1995, by Dischord Records. It is the band's most commercially successful album, peaking at number 126 on the U.S. Billboard 200 and number 18 on the UK Albums Chart.
Fugazi, also known as the EP 7 Songs, is the debut release by the American post-hardcore band Fugazi. As with subsequent release Margin Walker, Guy Picciotto did not contribute guitar to this record; all guitar was performed by Ian MacKaye. It was originally recorded in June 1988 and released in November 1988 on vinyl and again in 1989 on the compilation release 13 Songs along with the following EP Margin Walker. The photo used for the album cover was taken on June 30, 1988 at Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Margin Walker is the second EP by the American post-hardcore band Fugazi. It was originally released in June 1989 on vinyl and again in the same year on the compilation release 13 Songs along with the debut EP Fugazi. The 12" vinyl went out of print, but was remastered and reissued by Dischord Records in October 2009.
The Faith was an early American hardcore punk band, from Washington D.C., with strong connections to the scene centered on the Dischord label. Along with Minor Threat, the Faith were key players in the early development of hardcore, with a (later) melodic approach that would influence not just associated acts like Rites of Spring, Embrace and Fugazi, but also a subsequent generation of bands such as Nirvana, whose Kurt Cobain was a vocal fan.
End on End is a compilation album by American punk rock band Rites of Spring, released in 1991 on Dischord Records. The album consists of the group's first album Rites of Spring and its EP All Through a Life, along with an extra studio track.
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