Customer Reviews

These Are Not Fall Colors

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Lync's "These Are Not Fall Colors" ranks as my favorite album in the past ten years, if not my favorite all time. In fact, it is the first album I have bought since high school which begged a second listen after the discs first set of revolutions. You'll not be sorry for parting with your money to purshcase this disc. The disc's first three songs are king but the intensity does not wane in the later tunes. Buy this disc or I will come to your house and cook liver and onions.

In revisting this review three years later, I want to amend it by stating that this ranks as my favorite disc of all time. I still listen to it on an almost daily basis and do not grow tired of the energy and urgency. "Silver Spoon Glasses" ranks as one of the best "love" songs of all time. It is especially great if you have been overlooked for another guy. Ah, the pathetic days of high school love! If only I had written a song like this when I was in high school or even in my first years of college, I would still be in a band.

I bought this LP back in '95 on a complete whim. I knew nothing of the band, had heard no reviews good, bad, or otherwise. Hey, it's on K Records, I thought, how far wrong could I go? Amazing to think I used to buy records that way, when nowadays I need a sworn affidavit from a realiable party assuring me that it's worth seeking out and downloading 30-second previews of the songs. But in the 90s, if you were into indie rock, you could get away with it. There was just that much great rock music poking out of every corner.

A nice flashback, but about this record: it holds up beautifully after 10+ years. In fact, I re-purchased this on CD not long ago because the main riff from "Cue Cards" randomly popped into my head and I couldn't get it out. This is some 7 years after the last time I listened to the record, and it took me almost a week to figure out what it was! Lync's debut is a dynamic and melodic rock album, moderately experimental but never treading too far into uncharted waters or -- horrors! -- "post-rock", capped off with some truly great vocal performances. All bands that aspire to a half-screamy/half-sung vocal aesthetic should use this record as their template. I'd like to say "Fugazi channeled through a stripped-down Olympia pop band" but that's oversimplifying things; Lync truly occupied a sonic territory all their own. I don't think I really appreciated how good this band was back then, perhaps spoiled by the glut of great bands cropping up all over the place, all vying for my attention. I'm so glad I had a chance to rediscover them.

Anyway, I ramble. Find a copy, and buy two.

They were a great example of the Olympia band scene, with a sound now emulated by the likes of Modest Mouse (and I even heard some of this album in R.E.M. "Monster" -- heck they were in Seattle at the time). Alas, they split up, but their final performance was almost worth it.

One of the most unsung acts on K Records, Lync's only flaw was that they didn't last long enough to reach anyone who could have celebrated them. Before the Brooklyn Invasion, indie rock's nucleus was Olympia, WA, and Lync did more to define its sound than anyone else: angular, chaotic post-hardcore at the meeting point between Seattle's grunge, Louisville's nascent post-rock and D.C.'s hardcore punk. Logic tells us that they shouldn't have wallowed in obscurity for two years only to flame out, but then, little in the music business is logical.

For a handful of Washingtonians and critics, however, Lync was instrumental in helping to invent emo. It's practically an insult to call anything emo these days, but hearing Lync's lone LP, These Are Not Fall Colors, today is like seeing a strand of modern rock's DNA. There's scores of emotion here, but it's unusually puzzling and oblique; guitar chords hit you sidelong and ricochet off the contrapuntal bass, splattering nervous energy everywhere. The fuzzy, lo-fi production is pure early `90s indie, lending Fall Colors the edginess of a Dinosaur Jr. demo tape. The cumulative effect is that of a wild beast crouched behind leaves--partially obscured but powerful nonetheless.

Lyrics-wise, Lync is more Unwound than Sunny Day Real Estate--difficult to understand. I can make out Sam Jayne screaming "Sometimes" over and over in "Perfect Shot" and "Where has it gone?" in "Pennies to Save," but the words are mostly garbled, content to lay buried underneath the music. It's an egoless move that, either by accident or design, only adds to the album's mystique. The dam finally breaks near the end of the disc, on "Turtle." Wouldn't you know it, it's actually about a turtle--maybe: "Push with hands / Push with head / The shell is broken / But I'm not out yet / I have trouble getting started." How emo is that? Still, it sounds more like something sung to preschoolers than a poem ripped out of a 13-year-old's journal, and it's a cute conclusion to an album that almost risks taking itself too seriously.

From a purely sonic perspective, Lync has more in common with early '90s art-punk groups like Jawbox and Shudder to Think than a heart-on-sleeve chart-topper like New Found Glory. In fact, Lync most remind me of Roadside Monument, Castor, Juno, and other ill-fated bands that found themselves halfway between emo and twisty, cerebral math-rock. Lync struck a similar balance: If the studio mastering on Fall Colors was big and messy, the playing was laser-precise, angular and serpentine even while chained to a 4/4 meter. Emotionality wasn't the goal, per se, but the byproduct of three people giving it their all and making a huge, complicated, beautiful noise. That said, it's easy to hear classic "emo-isms" before they ran through the commercial flattener: Sam Jayne's vocals are gravelly and yearning, and the guitar line that begins "Angelfood Fodder & Vitamins" would shortly become one of the most ripped-off riffs in the genre. But Fall Colors is no more emo than any post-hardcore record that balanced artistry with feeling; rather, it's a curious snapshot of what emo might have been.