6. At The Drive-InRelationship Of Command
Did you have a big hardcore and post-hardcore phase during your teenage and university years?
I had a big phase of that, yeah, though it wasn’t super-long. I had a brief emo phase where I was listening to a bunch of quite regrettable music from the early to mid-2000s, but also discovering bands like Fugazi and Sunny Day Real Estate amid some terrible pop-screamo stuff. I would have discovered At The Drive-In during that era too, and they’re one of the bands that have stuck with me since. In/Casino/Out or Acrobatic Tenement might have been the ‘cooler’ choice but Relationship Of Command was obviously the album that made them big and every time I put it on, it makes me feel something.
There’s not a single song on that album that doesn’t evoke some visceral memory while also feeling like an actual standout piece of music that I’d still return to. There’s also a surrealist and absurdist vibe to it in that all the lyrics are quite nonsensical.
I guess that carried over into the work Omar [Rodríguez-López] and Cedric [Bixler-Zavala] did with The Mars Volta.
Yeah, I actually loved that first The Mars Volta record [De-Loused In The Comatorium] too. I was considering putting it in this list but I guess it’s apples and oranges picking between them. I was talking to Arthur [Cayzer, AKA Pariah] about this the other day and his hot take was that The Mars Volta’s first album was better than any of the At The Drive-In ones. The Mars Volta were fully a prog band though and if you love them and listen to prog, you maybe don’t put on an At The Drive-In record, so it’s hard to compare them.
