I first heard about Finch through my then roommate Abe. “Dude, check out this video on youtube!” What I saw was grainy footage of a band playing to a roomful of sweaty guys. The fans were ecstatic, and belted out every word to every song. I also noticed that the songs were catchy but had inserts of howling screams. I became an instant fan. Looking back at the video now, I can see that the vocals were off key and many chords were messed up, but it still perfectly captured the essence of what I liked about the band. I went down to Tower and bought a copy of What it is to Burn, I was not disappointed. Overall, most of the songs were good, and a handful were played a million times, especially the last track, What it is to Burn. This was new for me, because by that time Emo had been around for a minute, but I had never bought into it… and Finch was being labeled as an Emo band by many. I took it in stride however and chose to just enjoy the music.

A couple of months went by and I heard about some band called The Used. I was near UCLA and stopped by a record store called Pugz (now defunct) and found the album. I bought the album without ever having heard any of their music. The cover art actually sold me. I was on my way to San Diego and so had a full two hours to soak it in. At first it was really hard to digest, something about Bert’s singing was a shock… but once I got used to it, it was like crack. At that time in my life, The Taste of Ink was the most inspirational song ever. I had read their bio, read their lyrics, seen their music video, and it all made sense to me. I hadn’t felt so alive in a long time. Although What it is to Burn was great, The Used became somewhat of an obsession for me.

As I read more about The Used and the scene they were being surrounded by, terms such as “Screamo” started emerging and other band names were getting mentioned in the same line as The Used. I ended up at the Warped tour the next summer and wound up witnessing an amazing live performance on a side stage, I found out that the band was called Story of the Year. I waited for their album to come out and when Page Avenue arrived, I promptly bought a copy. When I finally got down and listened to the album something clicked. The production was good, the songs were catchy, but something was wrong. I realized I hated it. It had all the smooth catchy melodies interrupted by perfect screams, but I wasn’t buying into it. The album was even produced by the John Feldman, who had also produced The Used. What was so amazing to me about The Used was how genuine it was. Somehow Feldman had captured four Utah boys at the height of desperation and it was beautiful. By the time Story of the Year came around, the sound that The Used had recorded in their debut was being replicated - which meant it wasn’t 100% genuine. To be fair even The Used wasn’t able to capture that essence in their next two albums, but at least they harvested that “screamo sound”.

Now when I hear of these screamo bands with names that 105% of the time have adjectives like “bleed” or “dying” in their names, I want to puke. What it is to Burn and The Used both came out in 2002, and sparked a movement. Unfortunately the sound got played out by 2003.

Here’s the Finch video that got me into them:

Here’s The Used music video I used to watch every night: