Out of the Box is an irregular series focusing on seven inch records. It’s an excuse to engage with my collection in a new way, as well as to write about older records and genres we don’t often cover at ACL.
OUT OF THE BOX #19
Angel Hair ~ Angel Hair (1994)
Last weekend I caught the Saetia and On the Might of Princes reunion show at Bowery Ballroom in New York, so lets pick another throwback screamy hardcore 7” for this latest installment of Out of the Box. Angel Hair. This record probably found its may into my collection sometime around my senior year in high school, 2001-02. As I’ve written about previously, the Dischord label was a profound influence on little me (see Minor Threat in OOTB#1) and my tween interest in labels Epitaph, SST, Alternative Tentacles, Fat Wreck Chords, Revelation, and Victory quickly developed into an interest in emo and sceamo (see Pg.99 in OOTB#3). Just as Pg.99 were an outlier to the Tri-State screamo bands whose shows I frequented, so are Angel Hair from the San Diego / Gravity Records scene they were associated with.
I was in the right place and time in my punk rock education when, early in high school, the end of the 90s, I began to discover what we now call “midwest emo” groups (American Football, Get Up Kids, The Promise Ring, Elliott, Mineral, etc). Even then we knew that “real” “emo” was Rites of Spring and Moss Icon (and my beat-up 1990 Mazda definitely had a Deep Elm’s “Death to False Emo” bumper sticker), but the term stuck and became enduringly linked to the post-hardcore influenced pop rock groups of the 2000s (including New Jersey’s My Chemical Romance, whose debut was produced by Thursday’s Geoff Rickley, and whom I booked twice for DIY shows in Westchester in 2002). The local scenes were always pluralistic and stylistically diverse. The New Brunswick scene gave us Thursday, Saves the Day, and Dillinger Escape Plan. I mean, relatively, of course, we’re still in a very white suburban rock context, but local shows would often include ska, metal, and acoustic singer-songwriters on the same bill. Diversity of styles meant more kids in the room. And yes, of course, the boundaries of these sub-genres were strictly enforced, all the more so as the internet gave us strangers on message boards to argue with. Listening back now, the distinctions and minor nuances feel much less important than they once did.
I first saw Thursday perform in a Firehouse in New Jersey in the summer of 2000, the local support for a bill that includes Boy Sets Fire, Bane, and Drowningman. Due to my interest in the DC scene and Fugazi in particular (whom I saw twice in DC’s Fort Reno park before their long indefinite hiatus began) I was already hip to Guy Picciotto and Brendan Canty’s Rites of Spring, and I somehow got exposed to Sunny Day Real Estate after hearing their live record played in a skate shop in the mall. It was the scene closer to home, in New York and New Jersey, that really resonated with me, particularly so-called “screamo” (Saetia, Off Minor, Hot Cross, On the Might of Princes, A Day’s Refrain, Neil Perry, Joshua Fit For Battle, The Assistant, The Heatherton Heatwave, and other bands around Level Plane, Robotic Empire and similar local labels), bands which shared many of the same hardcore and post-hardcore references. [Also noticing now quite a prevalence for (in)definite articles and prepositions.]
Even then I was a collector, I wanted to understand the histories and lineages. Probably through my interest in The Locust [I’ll have to write about a Locust 7” for a future installment], Drive Like Jehu, and Unwound, I’d been told by older friends to dig into Gravity Records. This set off an interest in tracking down records from west coast bands Heroin, Antioch Arrow, Clikatat Ikatowi, Yaphet Kotto, and Angel Hair.
Angel Hair were heavily associated with those bands due to their obvious aesthetic resonances and association with Gravity, who released this EP as well as their sole LP. But Angel Hair were from Colorado, not California like all those others. I’d also later learn that Yaphet Kotto were from Santa Cruz, but again, all distinctions I couldn’t appreciate at the time. I didn’t really know anything at the time, so Angel Hair were just this 7” and their sole LP, 1995’s Insect Mortality [which I never had a physical copy of, and which has since reissued in 2024 as Insect Immortality, including the EPs, which I listened to in preparation after choosing this 7”. The material really does sound a lot better]. I can only speculate on the influence that the mountains of Boulder, Colorado may have had on the band as opposed to sunny beaches of San Diego, but there’s no doubt that Angel Hair were even more jagged and intense than their labelmates (and that’s saying something).
I learned a lot about this scene only recently, from "Once Upon a Time in San Diego," Tony Rettman’s insightful profile for The Wire, May 2023 (Issue 471). Gravity was distinguished, in addition to their intense sound, by the characteristically creative packaging and design.
For the debut release of Colorado's Angel Hair, manila envelopes were cut down and run through a press multiple times to create a blurry collage of insects, mohawked punk rockers, and religious imagery. [Heroin’s Matt Anderson reflects] "I know the silkscreen stuff we did gets more credit, but I think we did a few interesting things on the printing presses. It really worked out well for me considering you couldn't go into any print shop with a stack of paper bags and ask them to run them through their press."
After reading those lines the first time, I immediately dug into my boxes for find this record. I just reviewed my relatively small screamo 12” collection… Yaphet Kotto, Heroin, Forstella Ford, Off Minor, Hot Cross, City of Caterpillar, Ink and Dagger, Waifle… most of the music was released on CD, or at least I was mainly buying CDs then. Much else I was downloading on p2p filesharing sites, as then as now much of this was obscure and released in small numbers. But I did track down this seven inch early on, and its packaging was a big part of its appeal. I mentioned in my Pg.99 article, but I was always particularly drawn to experimentation with 7” packaging design. Something about the format lends itself to that.
Angel Hair’s a-side begins with “New Rocket,” a classic intro song with an iconic slow build of guitar riffs before the drums and bass come crashing in. “I sell ice to eskimos when I'm not selling ass to assholes,” Sonny Kay howls with the same urgency I recognized in Refused’s Dennis Lyxzén or the glass shredded wails of Snapcase’s Daryl Taberski. “I'm doing what I do because you did/ How can I make me more boring and stupid?” Great chorus, no notes. At 3 full minutes, this sounds like a full fleshed out composition. In fact,t he song has a fake out ending at about 2:30, crashign back in with a snap of the snare at 2:36 for a final coda.
“Crash Course” has a nice heavy groove throughout, owing to a particularly killer drum part from Paul Iannacito, but the ambiguous lyrics hint at typical teenage male misogyny: “Nobody cares to know you, everybody owes you, everybody knows that no one has a job forever, no one has the clap forever...” Then again, it might just be about mandatory education in general. “The school is pregnant with a senior class.”
The b-side begins with some traditional low-E chugging and a classic slow bassline, as “T-Minus 60 Years,” screaming about “Midwestern civilization” and questioning
”What do you mean I should have thought of that before? I'm thinking of it now.” Punchlines abound, but the breakdown is worth it. Two years before Rent taught the general public how many days are in a “Season of Love,” Angel hair cried out “T Minus twenty-one thousand nine hundred days, five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred hours.” The record closes with “Second Cousin,” probably the most straightforward hardcore tune here, a minute and a half you can two-step to. The song builds to a nice chorus. “The stupid looks on all these faces, like the dust kicked up by jackalopes is never going to stop.” The final third of the song’s already economical form climaxing in less of a breakdown as break off, changing up the final chant to “And eat because your second cousins knows her love for art is never going to stop.” Sure.
A final note of interest: Guitarist Andy Arahood would go on to play in LA post-rock ensemble Red Sparowes. I was an early fan of Red Sparowes’s At The Soundless Dawn (2005), on Neurot Recordings, and the Red Sparowes / Grails split, As The Black Wind Withers In The Sky, We Are Graced Dimly In Our Dreams / Black Tar Prophecies Vol. I on Robotic Empire. So, that post-hardcore connection lives on in a way I didn’t fully appreciate back when we were reviewing those records at The Site Before. Other post Angel Hair projects I know less well and won’t comment on, but Josh Hughes went on to play in The VSS, Pleasure Forever, Rabbits, and SSOLD, bassist Todd Corbett in Stiffwhiff, drummer Paul Iannacito in Generalissimo), and vocalist Sonny Kay in The VSS, Year Future, and Mind Rider.
Now excuse me while I dig through this pile of old CDs. Also, it’s my birthday, so excuse some more nostalgia than usual, and feel free to toss me a birthday sub if you’re able.
HBD! This is a fun series. I've been thinking about a way to highlight my 7" records, too.